A bioclimatic building in Madrid: Analysis of the thermal response and long-term comfort indices review

Abstract

This paper presents a monitored performance study of a bioclimatic educational building with the best Spanish energy performance label. The building is half-buried in the north facade and it has been constructed integrating sunspaces, shading devices, wooden structures, differentiated facades, ventilation strategies, biomass boilers and geothermal conducts. The summer overheating produce by sunspaces was solved with the inclusion of optimize eaves to prevent the solar radiation only during the summer. The highest inner temperatures were reached inside the building during winter. The harnessing of the earth thermal inertia of the half-buried north facade decreased the heating and the cooling energy demand of the building. The post-processing of the registered data highlighted the and exceptional situations. Finally, a review of standardized indices for a long-term evaluation was carried out. The differences between the inlet variables needed by each index resulted in very different thermal comfort percentages. Adaptive models reached the highest values of thermal comfort while regulations based only on temperature set points reached the lowest thermal comfort percentages.