Omidreza Saadatian

A state of the art review of solar walls: Concepts and applications

Sustainable energy system design offers credible and innovative strategies to overcome environmental energy crises. Solar walls offer feasible technique for the exploitation of directional flow of heat in buildings. This article reviewed state-of-the-art concepts, applications and significance of solar walls for energy savings in buildings. Detailed operational framework of various solar-wall configurations, technology and efficiency as building component was discussed. Need for this sustainable energy design in buildings and constraints associated with their realisation were reported to aid proposed future research work.

Case study of wind-induced natural ventilation tower in hot and humid climatic conditions

This paper investigates the performance of a wind-induced natural ventilation tower through an empirical analysis in hot and humid climatic conditions. There are mainly two methods for inducing natural ventilation; namely stack ventilation and wind-induced ventilation. Due to the relatively lower difference between the indoor and outdoor temperature in hot and humid conditions, stack ventilation method alone is rendered insufficient to create desirable air flow between outdoor and indoor building environment to achieve comfort and indoor air quality for the building occupant. Hence, wind-induced ventilation method can be used to achieve the desired air flow rates and improve the indoor air quality for the building. This study revealed that at external wind speed of 0.1m/s, the aerodynamic inverted airfoil roof geometry on the wind-induced natural ventilation tower is able to generate extraction air flow rate of 10,000m3/h with average of 57 ACH to provide comfort and indoor air quality to the internal building environment in hot and humid climatic conditions.

Residential satisfaction; Meaning and interpretation

Residential Satisfaction (RS) has always been cited by different scholars, academicians, architects, urban planners and designers as a very important factor of design and planning process. However, there are various definitions and interpretations of this concept which stems from diverse views of different professionals. The failures of many housing and dwelling projects stems from lacking of knowledge on the determinants of Residential Satisfaction (RS) concept. This paper has utilized archival methodology for the past 13 years starting from 1997 until 2010 to compile existing definitions of RS in order to determine the core and principle of all of those various definitions. It was found out RS is a subjective dependent variable which depends on many physical and social parameters. However, the propriety of those parameters could differ for different people with different social cultural and professional background. The studys result indicates that, urban planners and designers and architects have similar points of consideration on the parameters of RS rubrics such as neighborhoods, social demographics, and housing and estate management. Nonetheless, some rubrics such as dwelling unit features, dwelling unit support services, housing conditions, and structure type are mostly emphasized by architects in comparison to the other disciplines. Besides, some rubrics such as environmental features of the housing and neighbor relationships are more emphasized by the urban planners and designers. The result will throw light for the people who are working on RS in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research projects and may enable them to have consensus in defining RS.

Effects of urban canyons and thermal comfort in the Persian Gulf region

Accessibility to thermal comfort spaces for citizens and urban outdoor activities could be one of the main goals of urban designers. The objective of this paper is to conduct a comparative study on two different urban fabrics, using thermal comfort and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods. Results relate the effects of urban canyons orientation on variation of the microclimate factors and consequently, on the thermal comfort situation in the hottest period of the year. The results indicate that traditional urban fabric is more thermally comfortable than the new residential urban fabric. According to the field measurements, thermal comfort calculation, and wind simulations, the canyons with North-South direction represent a better orientation for air circulation benefiting from sea breezes as compared to other canyon orientations. The result will throw light for the urban designers and policy makers of hot and humid climate in the Middle East.