Eleonora Sad de Assis

Urban bioclimatic design strategies for a tropical city

Some towns in the intertropical zone, such as the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, presented in this paper, have composed climates whose variations throughout the year require alternative design decisions, in order to make use of passive environmental resources. On the other hand, the great variation of urban settlements produces different kinds of microclimates inside the city. This paper shows the application of an urban design strategy that takes into account those climatic variations, using the citys available climatic data and physical simulations of the thermal field in urban areas, to analyze the influence of urban forms (land use, typology and building configurations) on climatic change. With the application of a thermal comfort index, it is possible to evaluate the local conditions of human bioclimatic stress. This kind of result can be applied to the city land-use legislation, bearing in mind the preservation of bioclimatic conditions in urban spaces.

Avaliação de modelos de índices adaptativos para uso no projeto arquitetônico bioclimático

What kind of adaptive index is suitable for use in Brazil, being able to reflect the condition of acclimatization of the population in its results? This work has as objective the identification of an adaptive thermal comfort index adjusted to different existing climatic conditions in Brazil that can be used at the initial stages of the building project. The methodology adopted in this work is the comparison among four different adaptive indices and those ones validated by regional Brazilian studies in different climatic regions. Moreover, the four adaptive models were used as project tools when designing solar devices in different Brazilian cities. The performance of the devices was evaluated by means of computational simulation. The result was the selection of an index and range of comfort better sensitive to the different Brazilian climatic conditions. We found out that these indices are important tools in bioclimatic design, but its use in assessing the environmental comfort of the users has limitations.

Dataset on daytime outdoor thermal comfort for Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

This dataset describe microclimatic parameters of two urban open public spaces in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil; physiological equivalent temperature (PET) index values and the related subjective responses of interviewees regarding thermal sensation perception and preference and thermal comfort evaluation. Individuals and behavioral characteristics of respondents were also presented. Data were collected at daytime, in summer and winter, 2013. Statistical treatment of this data was firstly presented in a PhD Thesis (“Percepção sonora e térmica e avaliação de conforto em espaços urbanos abertos do município de Belo Horizonte – MG, Brasil” (Hirashima, 2014) [1]), providing relevant information on thermal conditions in these locations and on thermal comfort assessment. Up to now, this data was also explored in the article “Daytime Thermal Comfort in Urban Spaces: A Field Study in Brazil” (Hirashima et al., in press) [2]. These references are recommended for further interpretation and discussion.