Towards a Green Building: A Preliminary Study of Natural Ventilation on Thermal Comfort and its Impact on Residential Building in the City of New Borg El Arab

Natural ventilation considered a one of challenges of the green building design.
This paper introduces a preliminary study for measuring the extent of natural
ventilation on thermal comfort to the impact of indoor air quality in the residential
building in the city of New Borg El Arab (Egypt-Japan University of Science and
Technology, E-JUST as example) in relation to air velocity, relative humidity, and
air temperature. New Borg El Arab climate in the site location is semi-arid
Mediterranean climate, this type of climate is characterized by a brief, mild,
moderate rain in winter and long warm summer months with no rain. To apply this
study, a methodological procedure has been followed. A field study is conducted in
a one flat from the building of the E-JUST to assess the indoor thermal conditions
based on adaptive standard comfort model during the month of climate change
(October through 3 experimental measuring 1st, middle, and last of the month). The
indoor measured data of air temperature, air velocity and relative humidity were
used to check if the apartment that choose as a case study complies the thermal
comfort or not by using ASHRAE psychrometric chart. Personal observations, field
measurements and ASHRAE psychrometric chart analyses show that there is
significant thermal discomfort inside the domain. The results indicated that the
indoor air quality in many of the cases didn’t achieve the thermal comfort for most
time. This is because there is no circulation for natural ventilation in this orientation
of the domain.