A Transportable and Energy Optimized Residential Building Architectural Design for the Mongolian Climate

Abstract

The intensity of human activities adversely affects nature, and the environmental surroundings and climate change. As part of the initiatives reducing the adverse impacts, sustainable architecture importance is increasing. Depending on the climate, culture, and lifestyle, the residential buildings in the world have varying architecture. One of the unique architecture is nomadic architecture. For the nations with nomadic culture, transportable housing type is dominantly used. However, in the field of transportable building, there is a lack of research on building physics. This type of residential building challenges more the architectural and engineering design in respect of material and structure selection attached to mandatory characteristics of portability, indoor comfort, the feasibility of energy generation and operation in various sites, and energy efficiency. The research aims to improve existing yurt in terms of indoor comfort and energy efficiency without sacrificing the key concepts of the yurt and that is compatible with the Mongolian climate. Mongolian context has selected as the base environment as it has one of the most extreme and severe climates in the world. To fulfil the set of objective, as inception the literary review on the various transportable residential building has performed which has found there are 9 different shapes of yurts used around the globe. On the basis of the 9 types of yurts found, the best shape yurt is identified through the comparative analysis using dynamic thermal simulation method. The development has conducted within the frame of yurt opening, orientation, structural material, building system. For each of the component, various versions are tested and optimized using simulation tool IDA-ICE 4.8 and the best outcomes are determined in terms of energy efficiency and indoor comfort. Finally, the best versions are combined to form the optimized transportable residential building. The study contributes to the development of nomadic vernacular buildings in terms of indoor comfort and energy efficiency which is notably novel in the building physics research of the nomadic vernacular architecture.