Abstract
Changing climate intensifies heat stress, resulting in a greater risk of workplace productivity decline in timber office buildings with low internal thermal mass. The impact of climate change induced heat exposure on indoor workplace productivity in timber office buildings has not been extensively researched. Therefore, further investigation to reduce the work capacity decline towards the end of the century is needed. Here, heat exposure in a net zero-carbon timber building near Brussels, Belgium, was evaluated using a reproducible comparative approach with different internal thermal mass levels. The analysis indicated that strategies with increased thermal mass were more effective in limiting the effects of heat exposure on workplace productivity. The medium and high thermal mass strategies reduced workplace productivity loss to 0.1% in the current, 0.3% and 0.2% in the midfuture, and 4.9% and 3.9% for future scenarios. In comparison, baseline with low thermal mass yielded a decline of 2.3%, 3.3%, and 8.2%. The variation in maximum and minimum wet-bulb globe temperatures were also lower for medium and high thermal mass strategies than for low thermal mass baseline. The study findings lead to the formulation of design guidelines, identification of research gaps, and recommendations for future work.
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Acknowledgements
The project was funded by the Service Public de Wallonie (SPW), Belgium, under BElgian WAllonia REsearch (BEWARE) fellowships and European Union (EU) framework program for research and innovation, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) through contract no. 847587 for the Project SurChauffe. This material is also based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research’s Urban Integrated Field Laboratories research activity, under Award Number DE-SC0023520. We would like to thank the members of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University, and Southwest Urban Corridor Integrated Field Laboratory (SW-IFL) for their support. We would also like to thank the stakeholders of Project OCCuPANt. We would like to acknowledge the Sustainable Building Design Lab at the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the University of Liege for the valuable support and use of the state-of-the-art Super COmputeR ProcessIng wOrkstatioN (SCORPION) for building performance simulations and data analysis. This study is a part of the IEA EBC Annex 80 - Resilient Cooling of Buildings.
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Deepak Amaripadath: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, software, data curation, visualization, writing—original, writing—reviewing and editing. Mattheos Santamouris: conceptualization, methodology, validation, writing—reviewing and editing. Shady Attia: conceptualization, methodology, supervision, validation, writing—reviewing and editing
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The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. Mattheos Santamouris is an Editorial Board member of Building Simulation.
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Amaripadath, D., Santamouris, M. & Attia, S. Climate change induced heat stress impact on workplace productivity in a net zero-carbon timber building towards the end of the century. Build. Simul. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-024-1116-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-024-1116-7