Paper Conference

Proceedings of BSO Conference 2018: Fourth Conference of IBPSA-England

     

Sensitivity Analysis of Sustainable Urban Design Parameters—Thermal Comfort, Urban Heat Island, Energy, Daylight, and Ventilation in Singapore

Elif Esra Aydin, J. Alstan Jakubiec

Abstract: Urban settlements require design improvements towards increased comfort and reduced energy consumption through active and passive means to create liveable cities in the future. This study investigates the impact of 6 urban design criteria—building height, plot ratio, greenery, glazing ratio, shading, and materiality—on discrete environmental metrics for sustainability using Morris sensitivity analysis (SA) method. The authors calculate a series of critical and emerging environmental measures which indicate the suitability of an urban design: Urban Heat Island (UHI), Outdoor Thermal Comfort—using the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), Urban Energy Use Intensity (EUI), Urban Daylight Autonomy (UDA), and Annual Mean Ventilation. This study identifies essential parameters for comfortable and low-energy urban communities in early-phase urban design processes for tropical climates using Morris sensitivity analysis. The effort is focused on an increased modelling comprehensiveness—including more related and codependent sustainability measures compared to previous works—and understanding the impact of parameters investigated on a comprehensive set of environmental measures. The authors find that building height and site coverage ratio most significantly impact many of the studied environmental measures. However, all parameters are significant on at least one environmental measure; therefore, it is difficult to simplify the complex process of urban environmental and sustainable design.
Pages: 132 - 139
Paper:
bso2018_2A-4