Quantifying thermal resilience of office buildings during power outages: Development of a simplified model metric and validation through experimentation

• Published in: Journal of Building Engineering 2023-08, Vol.72, p.106564, Article 106564
• Main Authors: Ismail, Nagham, Ouahrani, Djamel, Al Touma, Albert
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: EnergyPlus simulations; Experimental validation; Multi-variate linear regression model; Passive survivability; Thermal habitability; Thermal resilience
• ISSN: 2352-7102; 2352-7102
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jobe.2023.106564

A growing interest has been recently demonstrated in studying the thermal resilience of buildings that goes beyond minimum standard requirements to meet performance targets under extreme climate changes. However, there is currently no universally agreed-upon metric for measuring thermal resilience. Therefore, this study focuses on quantifying the thermal resilience of office buildings during a power outage disruption. This is achieved by developing a simplified straightforward model that is based on rational definition. The metric evaluates the number of safe and comfortable hours before loss of productivity for a typical hot office day based on two criteria: thermal habitability and passive survivability. When one of these conditions is jeopardized, the number of hours is recorded by performing energy simulations that account for different ranges of office building parameters. The simulation results are expressed in the form of a multi-variate linear regression equation. The minimum office thermal resilience (OTR) is found to occur at relatively large window to wall ratio (WWR), large solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC), and low external wall thermal capacity (kappaw). To validate the developed simplified model, experiments are conducted in the Energy Efficiency and Building Design Laboratory located at Qatar University. Fair agreement is revealed between the energy simulations and the experiment, with a maximum relative error of 12%. Furthermore, the linear regression model developed in this study accurately predicts the office thermal resilience metric (OTR), with a mean relative error of 10% when compared to both the simulations and the experiments. •Office thermal resilience is defined as the safe working hours during power outage.•Two assessment tools are used as: passive survivability, and thermal habitability.•The defined metric is quantified as a function of the office building parameters.•A simplified regression model equation is developed based on energy simulations.•Thermal resilience is mainly affected by the fenestration geometry and parameters.