THERMAL COMFORT PERFORMANCE IN A RESIDENTIAL BUILDING OF SUBTROPICAL CLIMATE OF NEPAL –A CASE STUDY OF HETAUDA

Abstract

Our temperature sense of our environment is referred to as thermal comfort. Thermal comfort is influenced by two main environmental variables, including air temperature and relative humidity. Up to 90% of people's time is spent inside of homes. Buildings should therefore take the local environment into account while designing them in order to enhance the quality of life for those who inhabit them. Today’s Modern residential buildings in the country are designed and built without considering climatic factors .The study area is carried out in Hetauda Padam pokhari a sub-metropolitan area in central Nepal's Bagmati Province's Makwanpur District. .The main objective is to measure thermal performance for thermal comfort of modern residential houses of Hetauda incorporating its improvement in design polices for thermal comfort with comparison with modern residential houses with other types of house in terms of U-value, materials, temperature etc. to incorporate design strategies for the improvement of thermal comfort performance in upcoming modern residential buildings. This research adopts the post positivism paradigm. The objective set lead towards quantitative research as well as a qualitative research method. The outdoor and indoor temperature of the different nine types of the residential house like modern, hybrid &traditional residential building of Padampokhari for 7 days winter and 15 days summer has been collected in the field, which has been compared with each other investigated residential building of case area The summer comfort temperature of padampokhari, Hetauda has been calculated using Nicol’s adaptive thermal comfort model, which has been also compared with the assessed temperature of investigated residential house. The findings based on calculations and regression analysis shows that the investigated traditional residential house maintains 1-2.2°C indoor temperature in summer. The findings based on calculations and regression analysis shows that the investigated traditional residential house maintains 1-1.4°C indoor more temperature in winter Finally proposed design strategies for the newly constructed modern residential building has been suggested according bioclimatic chart and Mahoney table and recommendations at different levels has been provided for future study.