Summertime Resilience in an L-Shaped Long-Term Care Facility with Mixed Natural Ventilation and Pressurized Corridors

Climate change has exacerbated the summertime overheating in buildings, necessitating resilient adaptation strategies. Based on our previous work, which introduced a Thermal Resilience Index (TRI) ranging from Class F to Class A+ using a concept of resilient trapezoid framework, this study explores unit-level retrofit strategies for high-rise long-term care buildings. Utilizing a building simulation model validated by field data from a long-term care building located in Montreal, Canada, the thermal resilience of entire buildings and individual units is evaluated with mixed natural ventilation and pressurized corridors. The analysis highlights significant heterogeneity in units' resilience to extreme heat. The impact of different corridor ventilation configurations on room temperatures, thermal stratification across floors and unit-level thermal resilience are evaluated, following the ASHRAE standards 62.1, 62.2 and ventilation suggestions for the COVID pandemic. Results indicate that an enhanced ventilation rate in the corridor can mitigate the overheating conditions in the building, while it can yield diverse outcomes across units. These findings will inform our retrofit strategies in the field study and will be further evaluated with field-collected data.