oa Evaluating thermal performance in residential buildings: Examination of conventional wall materials in the regional climates of Egypt

This paper is the first part of a sequenced simulation analysis which aims at improving the thermal performance of Residential buildings through variations of external walls in Egypt. The findings of this paper present preliminary thermal analysis done for an air conditioned standard office building. The study focused on the thermal performance assessment of the building’s local construction wall materials and the analysis has been carried out using dynamic thermal simulations using the hourly weather data of Alexandria, Cairo and Aswan. A typical open residential space was selected for assessment, wall construction materials were selected according to a survey done for façade materials of office buildings in a smart village and fifth’s settlements in Cairo. The simulations in this paper were carried out in two consecutive stages: the first stage addressed the air temperature and energy usage on a year-round basis to define the peak day and the worst orientation among the four main orientations. The second stage results focused on the peak day occupancy time and the worst orientation performance of the building. Peak day results were analyzed and compared in the three studied cities. The thermal performance of the conventional wall materials showed that the predicted percentage of dissatisfied people was (21%) and (27.5%) in Alexandria, a Mediterranean coastal region, and Cairo, a semi desert region, respectively. While the higher predicted percentage of dissatisfied people (34%) was attained in the extreme dry desert region of Aswan.