Tropical Responsive Envelopes for Urban Heat Island Mitigation in Tropical Countries: A proposed workflow for integrated environmental digital simulation

Since tropical countries present wet and dry seasons all year round, the objective of solar envelopes significantly shifts and aims to minimize the penetration of direct sun access to the buildings, due to high temperatures. As a consequence, the air conditioner (AC) frequently becomes a short-term solution to mitigate a building’s temperature, which unfortunately contributes to an annual increase in energy consumption. Accordingly, shading conditions become considerably relevant for urban form generation in tropical contexts, especially to reduce the UHI effect for tropical high-rise building areas. The concept of tropical responsive envelopes is then proposed not only to create shading for adjacent buildings but also to perform self-building protection that refers to self-shading envelopes. This concept specifically deals with solar-radiation reduction in order to achieve appropriate daylight in both the proposed building and the surrounding context. To do so, a solar protection plane and ray tracing analysis are performed based on shading performance criteria. In parallel, solar radiation simulation is applied to identify potential solar collectors on the building surfaces. This provides architects with a comprehensive method of tackling passive solar design strategy for urban equatorial climates.