Abstract—Building shading is a tried and true strategy for
passive cooling to reduce energy consumption. But shading also
affects the mobility system outside of buildings. This paper
analyzes the effects of building shading on outdoor thermal
comfort. It focuses on building height and density as the two
design parameters of urban built form and uses weather data
and passive shading simulation to derive a measure of the effect
of walking outdoors. The model is specialized to regions of
extreme heat and humidity, drawing weather data from Abu
Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The methodological
developments are then demonstrated on four urban design
schemes: high-density, low-rise; low-density, high-rise;
low-density, low-rise; and high-density, high-rise. The results
show that the optimal urban system for hot and humid locations,
in terms of improving outdoor thermal comfort, comes from
increasing the height-to-width ratio of the built urban form.
Index Terms—Shading effect, thermal comfort, thermal
comfort index, urban design.
The authors are with the Institute Center for Smart and Sustainable
Systems at Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, United
Arab Emirates (e-mail: ebaca@ masdar.ac.ae, itsai@ masdar.ac.ae).
[PDF]
Cite: Edgar Eugenio Samano Baca and I. Tsung Tsai, "A Model-Based Approach to Measuring the Effect of
Shading on Outdoor Thermal Comfort," International Journal of Engineering and Technology vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 116-121, 2015.