Generation of a reference dataset with twenty low-income single-family houses in Fortaleza, Brazil and thermal discomfort assessment

Abstract

Although created with the purpose of reducing the Brazilian housing deficit, the “Minha Casa, Minha Vida” government program (PMCMV) presents a large part of its constructions with low built and indoor environment quality. Expecting the increase of the families’ income in the following decade, it is important to improve the living conditions of those inhabitants, which may result from improving the thermal comfort, reduce the energy consumption or mitigate the energy needs. To determine which is the most cost-effective, which can be corrective passive design measures, the use of HVAC systems, or production of renewable energy for self-consumption, this work describes the creation of a dataset of twenty building models of current buildings to be used as reference set on which to test different scenarios. The reference set has several indoor space arrangements of a single-family typology in Fortaleza, which follow the minimum requirements of level 2 of the PMCMV program. The dwellings were created using a floor plan generative design approach and the thermal comfort evaluated using dynamic simulation (EnergyPlus) according to the thermal performance for housing norm NBR 15575 and Technical Regulation of Quality for Residential Buildings (RTQ-R). The typical urban context was taken into consideration during the building generation process and evaluation (reflection and shadowing of solar radiation). The synthetic dataset presents diverse building solutions and all buildings ranked A according to the Brazilian building energy ranking system.