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Building orientation is a significant design consideration, mainly with regard to solar radiation and wind. In predominantly hot humid regions like Malaysia which receives sunlight all year around, buildings should be oriented to minimize solar gain and maximize natural ventilation. This paper describes an investigation into the effect of building orientation in view of solar radiation absorptance of exterior wall, varied area ratio of glazed window to wall and the effect of natural ventilation on the thermal performance for residential building in tropical region. The Fajar Harapan building which is a postgraduate student residential building is oriented in the east west directions, and located in USM Campus, Penang. Two rooms were selected for the case study, one facing the east and the other facing the west direction. The differences between in/out door air temperature and air velocity of both rooms were measured from the field directly using the comprehensive data logger BABUC/M. This data have been analyzed and investigated. The results show that east windows have more obvious effect on increasing indoor air temperature than west windows, that is applicable for ventilated or unventilated rooms.

This study aims to achieve a balance of daylight availability in the work-plane environments of a fully glazed facade integrated with a light shelf system using an optimization procedure that can assist architects with assessing the daylighting performance of numerous design alternatives, and build-up the optimized design. The approach uses parametric design, simulation modelling, and genetic algorithms. A case study of a typical office is carried out to test and verify the effectiveness of the optimization procedure for a light shelf system. Five parameters of light shelf design are optimized in two solar solstices (June and December) and one equinox in March under the Malaysian sky conditions. The optimization results indicate that the optimal design options of light-shelf parameters have great potential for illuminance improvement. After the optimization, the daylighting performance of useful daylight illuminance compared to reference models is increased respectively with an average value of 15.6% and 4.7% on the 21st of June, and by 17.5% and 5.8% on 21st of March, and by 5.8% and 11.3% on 21st of December. Statistical analysis is achieved to investigate the relationship between the performance metric of the optimal design options and the other cases, the outcomes showed that the regression analysis indicated a high level of reliability as well as different levels of variation coefficients.

Glazed windows can cause intensive overheating due to solar radiation within buildings in hot climates. These glazed windows, according to their apertures, can also provide cross-ventilation which is necessary for cooling and improving thermal comfort of occupants. Many computerized environmental simulation tools are available to help designers to predict the environmental performance of their design at the early stage. The thermal comfort study presented in this paper involved the use of field measurement and computer simulation tool, i.e. Ecotect. Validation of Ecotect was carried out by comparing the computer simulation results with the field measurements of the east-facing room at Fajar Harapan Hostel, University Science Malaysia, which has a 50% glazed area-to-wall ratio. Output data from Ecotect were compared to the fieldwork data in terms of indoor/outdoor air temperatures and indoor air velocity. The impact of reducing the glazed area from window wall ratio = 50% in the base case to 25% and 00% (i.e. window less) was investigated. The results showed that the simulation compared well with the field data with a difference of less than 0.9°C, indicating that rooms with a large glazed window area would be relatively cool during night-time only, and a smaller glazed window area would perform well during daytime as well as night-time.