The interaction of building energy use, ventilation performance and urban noise under future climate scenarios

This thesis studies the interaction of building energy use, ventilation performance and urban noise under future climate scenarios, comparing in particular the noise and climatic influences on non-domestic natural ventilation cooling. The main objective is to determine the level of climate change temperature increase that a noise reduction measure would mitigate. This involves quantifying the tension between maximising natural ventilation and maintaining good acoustic conditions.
Methods are linked that are appropriate to a number of scales: ventilation aperture, whole-building, urban area, and the climate scale. Using the Finite Element Method (FEM), it was found that the sound transmission of ventilation apertures varied by up to 8dB across the frequencies considered. Noise mapping and whole building thermal performance were used to quantify natural ventilation potential and the impact of noise reduction measures.
Three future climate data sets were compared and it was found that all sets provided acceptable information about future natural ventilation performance. The difficulty of adopting natural ventilation with the warming present in all the data sets was clear from the high levels of future overheating.
Using these methods and a representative future weather data set, a number of design implications were illustrated, such as the reduction in sensible cooling per unit of ventilation airflow with higher summer temperatures. The main comparison of acoustic and climatic environmental influences showed that a 10dB noise reduction measure affecting natural ventilation could mitigate a summer temperature increase due to climate change of between 2.0°C and 3.4°C.