Experimental Studies Of Comfort Levels of East-west And North-south Solar-oriented buildings In A Warm-humid Climate

摘要

Thermal comfort problems need to be addressed at the architectural design stage, particularly in Nigeria's warm, humid climate. Through experimental studies, this paper compares the indoor comfort levels of buildings with different solar orientations. Experimental model buildings with east-west and north-south solar orientations respectively were constructed for this study. Data on indoor comfort factors were obtained together with meteorological data and indoor thermal comfort parametric ranges. The experimental data were analyzed with descriptive statistical tools involving central tendency and dispersion. The hypotheses were tested using z-tests. The case study results showed that the differences of the indoor comfort levels of the model buildings were significantly different for the air temperature and not for relative humidity. The study also showed that the comfort levels of the buildings do not conform to comfort standards despite their orientations. This paper therefore concludes that solar orientation can contribute significantly to a more acceptable indoor comfort condition in buildings in warm-humid climates.