Mino-Rodriguez, Isabel; (2021) A thermal comfort model for high-altitude regions in the Ecuadorian Andes. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Of Ecuador's 3.75 million households, 33% live in poor-quality and substandard dwellings. Construction standards provide metrics and criteria for energy and comfort performance evaluation; that plays a significant role in designing adequate and affordable dwellings. Due to a lack of supporting evidence, the thermal comfort criteria have been adopted from international standards, such as ASHRAE 90.2:2018. In the absence of accurate contextualised comfort models, building standards can trigger a combination of wasting energy and exacerbating discomfort. Furthermore, householders' environmental perception may be affected by particular weather and geographical conditions. Therefore, this research aims to define thermal comfort criteria, aligned with residents' perception in subtropical highlands, to be used for the thermal performance assessment in dwellings in the Ecuadorian Andes. The research combined cross-sectional thermal comfort surveys and thermal performance simulation. Data was collected in three locations between 2400 and 3000 meters above sea level. This thesis's main outcomes add knowledge on why and how people adapt to high-altitude locations. Thermal comfort temperatures are significantly different across the study locations due to altitude. Moreover, the comfort temperature differences also rely upon the broader limits of comfort acceptability for lower altitudes and acclimatised subjects. On the contrary, the range is narrower at higher altitudes and non-acclimatised residents. The derived high-altitude thermal comfort algorithm for the Ecuadorian Highlands resulted from the regression of the comfort temperature and the 24-hour mean outdoor air temperature. Over 80% of comfort hours were estimated for the study archetypes based on the high-altitude comfort model. International comfort models consistently overestimate the percentage of hours of discomfort for all the study archetypes. Moreover, the discomfort could increase up to 30% for dwellings in compliance with the thermal insulation requirement of the Ecuadorian construction standard (NEC11). The research outcomes are expected to contribute with grounded evidence to the development of local construction policy.

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