Journal of Civil Engineering and Architecture Research, vol.4, pp.1940-1950, 2017 (Refereed Journals of Other Institutions)
Abstract: A glimpse into the past of ancient countries, there is prominent traditional buildings, which are worth full throughout the generations in and these heritages have significant roles regarding sustainability. The climate has an important impact on the related architecture. As a result, constructors tried to use possible strategies regarding natural climatic for coping with harsh conditions. To exemplify, in a hot and arid climate of Iran, the main difficulties are encountering with the deficiency of water and humidity, severe climate-enforced architects to build their houses with extraordinary measures to meet. The most important strategies include proper layout orientation, the distance between buildings, building’ direction and form, climatic elements such as wind-catcher, central courtyard, etc. In the ancient architecture of Iran and the most of the middle east countries, wind-catchers play a crucial role to provide thermal comfort for occupants, especially in hot climates. The paper aims to focus on the traditional housing in hot and arid climate of Iran. It is a country with different climatic zones, and, traditional builders have presented several logical climatic solutions to improve human comfort and energy efficiency of the buildings. Kashan, which is located in the province of Isfahan, is selected to be a representative city. To evaluating different strategies, the case study building’ energy performance was calculated by the aid of dynamic simulation tools, Design Builder, and Energy Plus. Various scenarios are applied on the wind-catchers, windows and different thickness of the materials to analyze the energy performance of building in various circumstance.