Heat resilience of apartment buildings in Korea and Germany: comparison of building design and climate

Abstract

A major concern in climate adaptation is to enhance the heat resilient design of residential buildings. However, recent scientific literature addressing overheating analysis is only focussing on individual countries. In this article, we discuss how different design of representative apartment buildings in two countries influences the overheating risk or cooling demand and what conclusions can be drawn from it. This is done for a low-rise apartment building located in Germany and a high-rise building in South Korea applying building performance simulation. Both countries are located in the moderate climate zone, but regional differences in frequency of tropical nights and radiant summer days lead to significant differences in overheating intensity (800 Kh/a for the German and 5100 Kh/a for the Korean) or cooling demand (1800 kWh for the German to 1300 kWh for the Korean). The lower cooling demand but much higher overheating intensity of the Korean building compared to the German is mainly caused by the different solar heat gain due to the glazed balcony design of the Korean building where these balcony rooms are not actively cooled. On the contrary, the common internal façade insulation of Korean buildings results in a higher overheating risk compared to the German building and in addition the lower potential of passive cooling by natural ventilation due to the necessity of insect screens in Korea. The large effect of implementing heat adaptation measures on overheating risk reduction or cooling demand (up to 90%) clearly demonstrates that both buildings are far away from a heat resilient design and that heat adaptation measures can address both climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Building thermal resilience framework (BTRF): A novel framework to address the challenge of extreme thermal events, arising from climate change

“…However, throughout the literature, we can observe several approaches to improve the performance resilience of a building and subsequently its resilience, whether it is passive, active, or related to the building's surroundings (Zhang et al, 2021), (De Wit, 1997;Zhivov, 2021;Schünemann et al, 2022). Some approaches focus on the building design, starting from the building's site characteristics, as a building's location and orientation can increase its thermal load (Azarnejhad and Mahdavi, 2019;Felicioni et al, 2020;Schünemann et al, 2022). For example, a study indicates that the heat island effect can create a temperature difference as high as 11 °C during a heatwave (Hong et al, 2021).…”

Climate change mitigation: thermal comfort improvement in Mediterranean social dwellings through dynamic test cells modelling

“…Should the current anthropogenic activity rates be maintained, in all likelihood climate change will reach 1.5 °C in 2030–2052 and 4.8 °C in 2081–2100, becoming a severe threat to environmental systems and human population [ 1 ]. Climate change is generally believed to lead to more frequent and intense extreme cold and hot climate episodes, especially with strong urban heat effects [ 2 ], which may cause serious effects on human health and even increasing mortality rates [ 3 ]. To tackle this issue, low-carbon emission and energy targets are demanded by international agencies and governments, with an especial focus on the building sector, which is among the top-three dominant energy consumers in 2019 [ 4 ].…”