The Control of Thermal Comfort and Energy Saving Through External Walls in Apartment Buildings in Palestine

Abstract

In Palestine, residential buildings, their components, and related enterprises consume a large amount of energy. Moreover, considerable parts of these buildings significantly affect human comfort through their effect on the indoor environment. Apartment buildings are classified as the most dominant housing pattern nowadays in Palestine due to the increasing population rate and the lack of lands. Therefore, these are requested to fulfill occupants’ comfort measures and consume substantial quantities of energy. External walls’ design and components are one of the most effective strategies for controlling thermal performance and energy consumption. This thesis strives to present an extended evaluation of the common building practice in Hebron in terms of the external walls’ components and thermal properties to present a comparative analysis of other less common and proposed patterns’ thermal performance and energy consumption. The study further presents multiple interventions for different building patterns and materials installation with different considerations including the insulation material type, thickness, and location for external walls cladded with stone with backfill concrete or stone with concrete hollow block as a second proposed building pattern. The study also rates condensation formation possibilities in external walls. The study aims at controlling the thermal comfort in external walls of middle apartments in residential building in the case of Hebron. The questionnaire, the field visits, and the simulations were the used research tools. Results were carried out using the Design-builder simulation software. Insulators selection guidelines were presented to help the architects in the design and execution phases by enhancing the indoor environment and reducing the consumed energy levels for heating and cooling through the right selection of the building pattern and insulators installed. The presented results encourage using hollow concrete blocks to replace concrete walls, as it has proven a maximum thermal enhancement, and a reasonable percentage of energy saving and payback period, which makes it a feasible solution. The study has also proved an average II of 40% energy saving in heating loads for northern and southern orientations, and 30-37% for eastern and western orientations by using Polyurethane foam as the most effective insulator for both building patterns when compared to the base case