Low energy measures for residential buildings in tropical regime

Towards the direction of developing sustainable building in tropical regime in general and in Indonesia in particular, facing multiple dilemmas, one of the dilemmas starting from the issue of the core variables in the green building which is low-energy buildings. By definition the main target for low energy building is the target for self-sustaining its energy supply while improving its efficiency. The issue of low energy building, in recent years, gained attention and moved towards a large-scale introduction in the residential sector. During this process, international criteria for energy use in buildings have become stricter, whilst the national standard for low energy building have not move forward only Jakarta municipality and Bandung municipality have developed its strategic regulation to achieve those targets. With a primary focus on landed house both for semidetached and detached houses, this study analyses how the measures the low-energy buildings which may further developed to reduce the energy use in the residential sector. The main attention is on the designing the façade, wind flow and local material performances. A thermal and fluid dynamics approach is applied, which here means that the concept of low-energy buildings is investigated from two main perspectives, namely thermal comfort with low energy uses by means of optimization for natural cooling. The thesis thus encompasses methods from both engineering approaches the studied areas through design, assessments and simulations. The thesis reveals how an increased process integration of the building's energy system can improve the thermal comfort in low-energy buildings. Moreover, local climate data was use, local material was collected – to study how the heat influences can be predicted in a low-energy building in the Bandung climate. The thesis further focuses on the low-energy building as an element in our society. (paper)