DEFINING BUILDING PERFORMANCE EFFICIENCY IN COASTAL REGIONS (THE NILE DELTA CASE STUDY)

Abstract

The building bricks are responsible for building performance efficiency, especially in coastal regions such as the Nile delta region. In this region the weather, as a result of climate change, may have a negative effect on internal building thermal comfort and on its energy consumption. So, for this reason, we used a soft computing technique such as Design Builder in order to define the building performance efficiency of two public buildings located in the Egyptian delta as a case study. In this study we used three brick types, including red, cement, and sand bricks for each building model. For each brick type, we investigated its effect on indoor temperature, energy consumption, carbon dioxide emission, and relative humidity. By the end of this research, we found out that the sand brick is the best among the three types because it consumes less energy and creates optimum thermal comfort. Also, sand brick is an affordable construction material due to the fact that its raw material is available naturally in the surrounding environment. On the opposite, we concluded that the cement brick is the worst type compared to the other two types and causes low efficiency for all building performance parameters.