Civil engineers have found that if you build an apartment building with angled, shark-fin-shaped overhangs on the side where the sun’s heat is strongest, the building will stay cooler.
It is one of many simple new building and design elements being proposed for a world where the months of July and August are regularly marked by droughts, heatwaves and record-breaking temperatures.
Since time immemorial, humans have been forced to live in hot environments. Ever since the advent of architecture, people have figured out how to construct buildings in a way that uses thermodynamics to cool them naturally. Many of these delightful architectural features can be seen in buildings from ancient times, such as the Roman amphitheaters, the Taj Mahal, and the wind towers of Yazd.
With the advent of modernism, these plans were largely ignored and houses – whether those of the lower or upper middle classes – took on the character of modular boxes, defenseless against all the elements.
In a study from Purdue and Colombia universities, researchers looked for a simple way to retrofit boxy buildings with features that could help keep them cooler in the face of rising global temperatures.
One problem they encountered during their research was that heat hits most urban buildings from two directions: from the sun and from the ground, where cement and asphalt absorb the heat and radiate it upwards throughout the day.
SIMILAR IDEAS: This ancient air conditioning system cools your home without electricity
“These two directions require different properties for cool walls,” says Qilong Cheng, a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue University who worked on the study as a doctoral student at Columbia University. “So we have this zigzag design with two surfaces, with one surface facing the sky and the other facing the ground.”
The angles, which are somewhat reminiscent of the shed roofs of factory buildings, can reduce the average indoor temperature by 3.5 °C.
The radiation rising from the ground is reduced or deflected by a material, while the sun’s heat is reflected by ultra-white paint.
OTHER INNOVATIVE COOLING METHODS: The stunning ‘House of Arches’ uses beautiful geometry to keep three generations cool in Rajasthan’s heat
Cheng and his colleagues now want to patent the design and turn it into a product, possibly out of corrugated metal, which they used in their study and found could reduce the energy consumption of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems by 14%.
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