Assessment of the temperature comfort of a model house

The growing concerns about global climate changes and the need to shift to more sustainable models of urban development create technical challenges for civil engineers and architectures altogether. In this project, a model house was designed appealing to AutoCAD, and scaled version was assembled using low cost materials. The design pretends to take advantage of the cooling ability of the circulating air around it. In order to assess how the thermal load is distributed around the house, a system of three spotlights is located at different angles and configurations, such that, the motion of the sun might be approximated. A Thermal Infrared Camera (TIC) was used to map the heat distribution around the house. Simultaneously, a group of temperature probe sensors were introduced inside the house in order to obtain the approximated heat distribution. Finally, the heat equation is solved appealing to the software Mathematica and using the Method of Finite Differences. This way the irregular geometry of the house could be mapped into a mesh of points and sole the problem numerically. Based on the obtained results, some recommendations are advanced which could be of great benefit for civil engineers and architectures.