Reducing the indoor temperature of buildings in the Philippines using passive cooling techniques

• Main Authors: Barroga, Francisco Cura, III, Chan, Ivan Alfonso Santos, Cinco, Stephen Kyle Navallo, Grau, Mikhail Pace Padernal
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Sustainable buildings > Design and construction; Cooling systems > Philippines; Civil Engineering
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/9119
• Institution: De La Salle University

In tropical countries, temperatures can reach up to 40°C which forces people to use their air conditioning (AC) units. This results increase production of greenhouse gasses. Thus, passive cooling techniques (PCTs) are known to be used around the world due to its potential to provide a living and working space without the energy demands of conventional AC systems. Example of PCT are green roofs and wind towers. The main objective of this research is to determine the most efficient type of passive cooling techniques, green roofs and wind towers, and a combination of the two. Utilizing the data loggers, the researchers obtain temperarure differences per minute for 12 weeks. Validation of which passive cooling technique was further checked by comparing the recorded data during the experimentation period. It was found that there is a significant difference in temperature between the structures since the P-value was less than 0.05, with the value very close to zero. It was observed that the daytime temperatures of the setups were different in almost every comparison, with only the green roof structure and wind tower structure comparison not exceeding the critical value of 0.847. It was found that the combined setup was significantly cooler than the green roof setup by 1.33°C, wind towers setup by 1.60°C, and the combined setup by 4.1°C during the daytime. Therefore, using passive cooling techniques can reduce the temperature by a significant amount. A loss in inefficiency when comparing single PCT setups with the combined setup, with the combined setup reducing temperatures by 4.1°C while green roof set up and wind tower setup added temperature reduction of 5.27°C. Finally, there was a large amount of expected power use reduction observed with using the combination setup.