A Model to Evaluate Energy Efficiency of Buildings Located in Hot and Humid Tropical Climates Hernando Gómez, Lesmes Corredor, Karen Klever and Maira Sierra 2018/04/20

Abstract

An exhaustive research literature review shows that in hot and humid tropical climates the air conditioning equipment demand around 50% of commercial building energy consumption. These weather conditions added to the corrosive environment and the lack of local availability of green materials in these developing countries don`t make feasible the use of methodologies like LEED in
the design and construction of buildings because high costs associated with its implementation. For these reasons a thermoeconomic model was developed to assess the construction and operating phases taking into account factors like: Colombian Caribbean Coast Region weather, conventional and high performance materials and equipment and their costs. A parametric study was carried out changing a set of building parameters like aspect ratio, orientation, glass/wall ratio, materials performance and cooling equipment types. In this way, a vapor compression cycle was taking into account to supply the chilled air and part load performance factor was taken into account to
estimate annual energy consumption; to calculate cooling load the CLTD/CLF method was used keeping constant plug load index and occupation factor index. This method will help in the early design stage to assess the sustainability during the building design process.

Authors and affiliations

Hernando Gómez, Lesmes Corredor, Karen Klever and Maira Sierra
Department of Mechanical Engineering. Universidad del Norte. Barranquilla (Colombia)

Key words

Thermoeconomics, sustainability, buildings, tropical climates.

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