Indoor temperature and relative humidity assessment of three construction systems for Dominican social housing in different micro-climates: A modelling study

Abstract

This paper evaluates the indoor temperature and relative humidity of three construction systems in a Dominican social housing scheme, located in different micro-climates present in the Dominican Republic (DR). For the latter, we used DesignBuilder to model the most common type of social housing (S1). In addition, we have also modelled two other improved construction systems (S2 and S3), which have been the result of two different studies, which were conducted in DR. The simulations were carried out in 10 cities. These cities belong to the following five micro-climates: tropical wet Savanna, tropical wet rainforest, tropical wet jungle, dry semiarid and wet temperate. In this article, we have evaluated the construction systems’ performance in the context of thermal conditions inherent to DR. The latter has been done to verify which of the evaluated construction systems is the most adequate for each micro-climate. For this, we determined the average operating interior temperatures and relative humidities for each construction system. We conclude that Samples S2 and S3 show the lowest temperatures in warm climates, while Sample S1 shows improved performance in colder climates. S1 exhibits the lowest values of relative humidities, followed by S3, while S2 presents the highest values.