Developing a new design passive house with a partial double-skin façade, double-skin roof, underground space and earth tube based on energy and airflow performance

This research originates from the interest in developing products with a holistic and interdisciplinary systems engineering approach, toward fostering sustainability. The study develops a new-design passive house with a double-skin envelope that delivers better energy consumption performance for heating and cooling relative to a conventional reference house, while achieving comfort-level indoor temperatures. A single-façade reference house is designed with the identical geometry, material and conditions of the new house living quarters, in order to demonstrate the performance of new house using a valid comparison. The new and reference houses are simulated cases and are not calibrated by actual models. The Soft Systems Methodology which enables designers to make better decisions at the earliest design stage is applied integrated with hard methods for the conceptual model development and performance comparison. Additionally, fluid dynamics behaviour of the air inside the double-skin envelope is analysed to demonstrate the airflow's contribution to the energy performance. The energy simulations demonstrate that the heating and cooling demands of new house are 19.1 per cent and 18.8 per cent lower than those of reference house, respectively. Furthermore, the computational fluid dynamics simulations reveal that turbulent airflow in the underground space on summer day increases heat transfer, and laminar airflow in the double-skin roof on winter night decreases such transfer.