The Impact of Architectural Design on the Thermal Performance of Low-Income Housing in a Hot and Dry Climate

One of the concerns of an architect must be to overcome the harsh climatic conditions and turn them into internal needs suitable for life and work without entailing unjustified costs in cooling the building. One of the most important objectives of the study is to know the building design impact on the natural cooling process of low-income housing to create a thermally comfortable indoor environment in the region of a hot, dry climate. Khartoum city was chosen as a study area, because of the spread of such buildings in it, and the climatic conditions were chosen during the 8-10 days of May 1998. As the highest days on which temperatures have been recorded. The thermal analogy was performed using the computer program HTB2 (is an international computer software specialized in simulating the thermal performance of buildings and studies related to energy consumption in them, and also works to provide scientists, programmers, researchers, and designers with flexible means of detailing the study of how the building works with heat and energy in the short term) for a simple residential building that is widespread among low-income people, the thermal simulation is performed for the selected design before and after the manipulation of the locations of some internal functional spaces aiming to deduce the effect of changing the design on the temperature. The study's findings indicated that linear design arrangement leads to poor internal thermal performance, compared with the staggered arrangement when build forms shade each other. Also, the path-way (corridor) is good for continuous air movement and ventilation but leads to the poor thermal performance of internal space