Professor: Salmaan Craig
Course: The Thermal Allometry of Massive, Breathing Buildings
Awarded Third Place in DenCity 2016.
DenCity competition by Shelter Global aims to improve the living conditions in the slums and informal settlements.
Core Interest
The relentless growth of cities urges for solutions that relate to the improvement of levels of comfort in confined spaces. Slums, being directly affected by the lack of space, are an intriguing object of study. With constraints on cost and feasibility, we believe the population will greatly benefit from a passively powered space-conditioning system.
How? Software “Sake”s
We have developed software that provides strategies that most affect natural ventilation by changing the following parameters:
A* (Openings): The value refers to the amount, geometry and distribution of openings that a building has to the exterior and interior network. These openings usually are windows, doors, chimneys, etc. The variation of this value will help to define the amount of fresh air coming into the building.
H (Height): This parameter refers to the height of a building. Hot air is driven to the upper part of a building due to its decrease in density, and vice versa when cold. This phenomenon creates differences in pressure, generating the opportunity to drive passive ventilation with the control of this parameter.
S (Interior surface): The interior surface area mostly affects to the amount of energy that a material can absorb and release. Changing this parameter will allow us to control the temperature of an interior according to current adaptive comfort models.
These values depend on a climate analysis that our software “SAKE” performs. With the climate data extracted from a specific location, we can provide a desired ventilation rate (Fn) to determine the amount of fresh air that a building has. If this rate is high, the ventilation will be high, if this rate is low, the ventilation will be low.
Harvard GSD | Spring 2016 | Group of 3
