Experimental Investigations of the Indoor Thermal Performance of Open Door System (ODOORS) House Prototype in Tropical Climate

Abstract

Natural ventilation represents one of the challenges in Malaysia public housing since the most significant and important parameters reflects the layout design efficiency is the thermal comfort within the indoor environment. This paper investigated the thermal performance of a public housing prototype in Malaysia climate context with the duration of two weeks field measurement. Open Doors House System (ODOORS) is a proposed public housing prototype for the community needs. ODOORS offers a system to provide adequate, affordable, comfortable and quality housing for the hard-core poor in Malaysian, which only requires short construction time, and using readily available materials. It is also versatile for permanent and temporary function. Inspiring by the design concept of traditional Malay house, ODOORS integrating the industrialized building system by utilizing market ready construction materials for construction in order to achieve environmental responsive architecture with mass production building material. The parameters considered in the study were air humidity and air temperature. The result shows that there are significant differences between maximum air temperature of outdoor and indoor from 14% to 24% for total spaces in the prototype. The maximum indoor air temperature recorded as 29.09oC, which is 14% lower than outdoor air temperature. The air humidity of indoor environment retained 11% 17% below the outdoor air humidity. Hence, the field measurement presents significant empirical findings about the effectiveness of natural ventilation strategies of ODOORS prototype