An investigation of the thermal comfort and climate change resilience of bioclimatic design strategies for free running social housing in San Luis Potosi City, Mexico

Rising temperatures due to global warming will impact on thermal comfort conditions in the social housing sector throughout the XXI century. Social housing represents the majority of the new build stock in the forthcoming decades in low and mid income countries such as Mexico due to demographic trends. Those families in social housing are particularly vulnerable to thermal discomfort because of the high initial and operating costs of HVAC systems that represent an economic burden that many of them will not be able to afford in order to achieve thermal comfort. Complementarily, the indiscriminate adoption of HVAC systems will add pressure to the national energy network and will further exacerbate global warming by increasing the amount of energy consumed by households. On the other hand, cities such as San Luis Potosi, Mexico have a relatively mild climate year-round which make it particularly suitable for the implementation of passive design as a low-cost strategy in order to achieve thermal comfort. This research explores the potential of bioclimatic design strategies and locally available construction materials to generate thermal comfort and climate change resilience for free running social housing in San Luis Potosi up to 2080. To do so, a social housing prototype was designed in a contextually responsive way that incorporates several aspects of sustainability and translates them into architectural design guidelines. Then, the prototype was used for building energy simulations with DesignBuilder software in order to test the climate change resilience of the bioclimatic design strategies and locally available construction materials. Complementarily, parametric optimization simulations were done in order to find out the best windows sizes that would provide a balance between solar heat gains during the cold season while preventing over heating discomfort during the hot season. Simulation results demonstrated that it is possible to design free running social housing by the use of bioclimatic design, local construction materials, and natural ventilation. They also allowed to provide general design guidelines for the implementation of those parameters for the wider residential sector in San Luis Potosi City, Mexico. It was also found that the adaptive model of thermal comfort (AMTC) as developed by the ASHRAE 55-2013 standard is a suitable and locally appropriate first approach to thermal comfort for the social housing sector because it can incorporate people’s thermal acceptancy with a more flexible thermal comfort temperature band than the one traditionally used when designing with the static model of thermal comfort. In that sense, the AMTC opens research possibilities for the development of locally appropriate energy saving standards and policy making