Sustainable Construction Methods and Materials in Hot Arid Climatic Region of Iran

Abstract

Sustainable architecture in the developing countries is still in its primary stages compared to the developed ones; however, such countries benefit a rich precedent which represents comprehensive examples of sustainable architecture which are proper prototypes for nowadays buildings. Several factors including compatibility to site, solar orientation, geometric shape, building envelope, etc., are the main pillars of sustainable buildings. Among them, building envelope and regarding materials and construction techniques demonstrate significant impacts on buildings thermal performance; therefore, the variety of sustainable envelope techniques and materials in the traditional architecture of hot arid climate of Iran are the subject of study in this research and their role in achieving sustainable architecture is investigated. Iran is basically divided into four climatic regions that the dry and hot region consists of the most parts of the Iranian plateau; thus, profound studies for this area to reach sustainable design are a necessity. New global and national regulations require buildings to apply high-resistance thermal insulations. Although insulations prevent buildings from wasting energy, they do not assist in natural cooling and heating. Therefore, updated materials and techniques are requested in the building industry to reduce energy consumption in buildings. This research is focused on the ecological and energy-efficient solutions in creating vernacular habitats as well as construction systems and materials in this part of the world. Firsthand studies written in Persian analyzing various aspects of historical buildings of this region are the main references to extract the most performing sustainable solutions in the primary stage. The findings are taken as the essential points for sustainable building processes in the future. This paper aims to resolve the major building concerns in the region through materials selection, envelope configurations, and insulation within wall section. Moreover, a common residential apartment building was modeled in Design Builder software to be investigated in terms of internal thermal comfort. A comparison of various frequent building envelopes in Iranian residential construction sector is carried out and the interactive effects of thermal resistance and thermal capacity in order to achieve lower energy consumption level are investigated. Findings show that the most thermal resistant envelopes are not merely the most efficient choices and heavier envelopes even with greater thermal transmittance values perform better in this region.