Effect of passive cooling strategies on overheating in low energy residential buildings for Danish climate

Climate changes have progressively produced an increase of outdoors temperature resulting in tangible warmer summers even in cold climate regions. An increased interest for passive cooling strategies is rising in order to overcome the newly low energy buildings' overheating issue. The growing level of air-tightness plays in low-energy buildings a double-acting role: reduction of energy demand and lack of adequate infiltration rate. In particular, the last one combined with higher outside air temperatures brings these new concepts buildings to progressively experience higher indoor temperatures creating not negligible thermal discomfort. In the present work the effect of passive strategies, such as solar shading and natural night-time ventilation, are evaluated through computer simulations. The analyses are performed for 1½-storey single-family house in Copenhagen's climate. The main result is that a crossed use of both strategies leads to a cooling demand reduction that varies between 98%-100% depending on the building's insulation.