Investigating the environmental performance of government primary schools in Egypt

: with particular concern to thermal comfort

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the environmental performance of government primary schools in Egypt. A general problem is that, the same basic prototypical designs are being built all over the country without enough consideration to the actual effects of the climatic conditions variation on the environmental performance of interiors.A pilot study was conducted and the research focused on investigating the thermal comfort of classroom's occupants and looking into passive ways of enhancing the design performances. Different studies including multi-approaches techniques were employed in order to achieve the main aim of the research. These studies included, theoretical study, field study and a computer based study. A wide literature review was conducted including; the concepts of the enviromental performance of school buildings, principles of thermal comfort, and the characteristics of the hot-dry climate and required consideration in the building designs to respond to this harsh climate. This aided to identify the assessment criteria to be used later in the investigation. It also aided to preliminarily formulate the potential passive measures that could be applied to the school prototypes to enhance their thermal performance. The field study aimed to identify and quantify subjectively and objectively the most critical environmental problem inside a number of case studies. This was conducted through three consecutive field studies in Al-Minya Governorate - that lies in the heart of Egypt - to represent the largest climatic design region in Egypt.A number of passive measures were formulated based on the literature review and the climatic analysis of Al-Minya using Weather Tool and Mahoney tables. The research case studies were modelled using the whole building simulation progam "Autodesk Ecotect". The proposed passive measures were applied to the case studies, and their effectiveness in terms of enhancing the thermal comfort of occupants was quantified using the detailed thermal simulation program "HTB2". Results reported that the proposed passive measures could enhance significantly the thermal comfort of occupants inside the case studies.

Date of Award	2009
Original language	English
Sponsors	Ministry of Higher Education, Egypt, Zagazig University & Egyptian Government
Supervisor	Tamer Gado (Supervisor) & David Unwin (Supervisor)