Ninth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The unequivocal reality of climate change and the urban heat island compose a vicious cycle, the latter highlights the necessity for adopting mitigation and adaptation strategies to counteract the outcomes of excessive heat and the negative environmental impact. The albedo of materials has been one of the most promoted solutions. A larger number of studies have investigated horizontal surfaces; a few of them were interested in facades. This paper is concerned about the building’s facade. It aims to investigate the interaction between the building physics in our case the facade Albedo, the urban configuration and the resulted effect on microclimate and pedestrians thermal comfort. Hence, in order to reach out our goal, a numerical simulation of microclimate was performed using ENVI-met 4.4 software to evaluate the outside climate and the level of outdoor thermal comfort in three diverse urban scenarios representing three urban canyons with different H/W ratio and surface material properties. The latter has been conducted under hot dry condition climate in Biskra; Algeria. The results of this work showed a correlation between the level of thermal comfort and the reflectivity of facade’s surfaces and the H/W ratio.