A new approach to guide early stages of building design to improve passive performance through the time-based thermal resilience metrics

In the face of climate change, and as building codes and standards evolve to promote increased building energy efficiency and reduced carbon footprints, it is also important to ensure that buildings, in particular housing, can withstand prolonged power outages during extended periods of extreme cold and hot weather to passively provide habitable shelter. The aim of this thesis is to develope a new approach to improve passive performance of buildings through the time-based building thermal resilience metrics of thermal autonomy (TA) and passive survivability (PS, also termed thermal resilience). In this study, thermal autonomy is a measure of the percentage of time a building can deliver comfort passively, without any additional active systems; and passive survivability is a measure of the length of time a building provides habitable conditions during an extended power outage as a result of extreme weather. Simulations of typical apartment suites are conducted in three given climatic locations: Toronto, Canada, warm humid summers, cold winters, and moderately sunny; Vancouver, Canada, overall cool and humid; Adana, Turkey, humid and dry summers, warm and rainy winters. Based on the simulation results, this study intends to show the relationship between these time-based building resilience metrics and conventional energy performance metrics, particularly energy use intensity. The main objective is to fill the communication gap between engineers and architects by providing a common language through a practical visualization technique. As a result, architects may have better control over their design considerations and improve environmental building performance at the same time. The idea is tested through a survey study which assessed the effectiveness of proposed approach through the visualizations of thermal autonomy and passive survivability analysis. The survey results revealed that engineers use current energy related metrics more than architects in the discussion of building performance. Compared to energy units, such as Watts and kilowatt-hours, performance metrics based on a measure of "time" are more intuitive, and correlate well with conventional energy performance metrics.