How Material Performance of Building Façade Affect Urban Microclimate

The world has experienced extreme urban growth in the last and current centuries, since more than half of the world population living in urban areas. Cities are expanding toward megacities with higher densities and narrower urban canyon profiles with huge urban structures and building masses. The transformation of urban landscape to densified city blocks has created phenomenon known as urban heat island (UHI); where the temperature in cities in comparison to rural, records high differences during day and night. Within this respect, this study explores the urban canyon profile as microclimate, considering the thermal performance of the building fa-çade, the heat exchange between the building and canyon surfaces as thermal masses. A parametric methodology implemented to study differentiation of six scenarios for façade material with different solar absorption, to narrow down between possible alterna-tives and find the optimized solution to have improved microclimate. Universal Thermal Climate index (UTCI) is being used to measure microclimate and outdoor comfort to monitor the temperature difference with combining air temperature, humidity, mean radiant temperature and wind speed in the urban canyon.      «

The world has experienced extreme urban growth in the last and current centuries, since more than half of the world population living in urban areas. Cities are expanding toward megacities with higher densities and narrower urban canyon profiles with huge urban structures and building masses. The transformation of urban landscape to densified city blocks has created phenomenon known as urban heat island (UHI); where the temperature in cities in comparison to rural, records high differences duri...     »