Passive Ambient Comfort and Correlation of Strategies and Vernacular Devices for Habitat Design in Arid Zones: The Case of Biskra, Algeria

Current concerns focus on the need to reduce energy consumption in construction and over the lifespan of buildings. A major objective is to create affordable housing. However, reducing the energy needs of the present without harming the needs of future generations remains difficult to put into practice, especially at the level of habitats in arid zones. In this research, a housing design assistance process for building designers is proposed, with the aim of converging towards a global optimum for the correlation and integration of vernacular devices and strategies in an optimized way. This will allow the integration of energy performance indicators and user comfort, in order to ultimately optimize, for this case study, the morphogenesis of residential buildings based on the morphological structure of a proposed building in Biskra, Algeria. This last developed process is articulated on various combinations distinguished for the case of the integration of devices and strategies, which allow maximum energy saving while ensuring the comfort of the occupants. As part of this research, this integration constituted a major challenge and made it possible to achieve a reduction in energy ratio of up to 25.11% compared to the standard building and the objectives of the research. View Full-Tex