Adaptive comfort assessment for different thermal insulations for building envelope against the effects of global warming in the mid-western Brazil

Abstract

The consequences of global warming have gained worldwide importance, also in the scope of built environment when related with the thermal comfort conditions of users. In this way, the objective of this research is to analyse the effects of global warming on the hours of thermal comfort of dwellings, with different thermal insulators in the external walls, considering the emission scenario A2 of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the IPCC. The methodological procedures consist of four stages: preparation of climate files for Future Scenarios (2020, 2050 and 2080) from the base climate file (base scenario); definition of a dwelling for study object (Tbase); preparation of thermal insulating intervention proposals, such as: EPS (T1), rock wool (T2) and glass wool (T3) and evaluation of thermal comfort conditions using the adaptive thermal comfort method. The results indicate that the air temperature increases by 21.5% and the relative air humidity reduces by 22% until the 2080 scenario if compared to the base scenario. From these new conditions, the percentages of Tbase comfort hours suffer a reduction of 63.61%, increasing the hours of heat discomfort by 98.48%, in the scenario of 2080 in relation to the base scenario. With the adoption of insulation, the T1 typology presented comfort hours of 58.4%, reducing to 17.9%. However, typologies T2 and T3 presented similar behaviour, with 27.2% of hours in comfort and 67.4% of hours in heat discomfort, in the 2080 scenario in relation to the baseline scenario. Therefore, it can be concluded that typologies T2 and T3 presented greater resilience to the effects of global warming, but it is necessary to incorporate constructive interventions to absorb the impacts of climate changes and provide better conditions of thermal comfort.