The increasing frequency and intensity of heatwaves raises questions about the thermal vulnerability of buildings and, in particular, on how to assess their resilience to extreme heat. In this context, thermal fragility curves, which describe the probability of achieving or exceeding specific temperature thresholds for a building, serve as an effective measure to define the thermal vulnerability of existing buildings and identify tailored retrofit strategies. This study focuses on deriving thermal fragility curves for a case study: a 6-storey residential building constructed in the 1980s with a reinforced concrete structure and masonry infill walls. Dynamic thermal modeling and simulation were conducted over a one-year period using synthetic weather files generated to account for future heatwaves. The simulation results provide useful relationships in particular between: outdoor temperature and indoor Standard Effective Temperature (SET); and between outdoor daily maximum temperature and indoor SET. These relationships were finally analyzed to create and compare fragility curves using maximum likelihood fitting and the so-called Cloud methodology.@en

Facades play a pivotal role in the performance of a building, serving various environmental, structural and operational functions. As climate-induced extreme events become more frequent, developing resilient facades is becoming crucial. Although facades can contribute significantly to the total post-disruption losses, their resilience is not sufficiently addressed in current design approaches. In response to this research gap, this study proposes a multi-criteria decision-making methodology to select optimal facade designs using resilience criteria: resilience loss and economic loss. The framework addresses the complexity of facade design, considering multiple hazards such as earthquakes and heatwaves. For seismic hazard, the facade’s resilience is defined as its ability to mitigate damage. In the case of heat hazard, resilience is assessed based on the ability to keep indoor conditions within a comfortable thermal range. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology, a case study of an 18-story office building in Izmir (Turkey) is used to compare alternative facade packages. These packages identify the facade design cases, each coupled with a dataset of seismic and thermal fragility curves. Numerical simulations are conducted to derive seismic and thermal resilience curves for each facade package, along with resilience criteria. These criteria are embedded into a practical decision-making process to enable the selection of the optimal design case based on project specifications.@en

This study aims to evaluate the impact of different urban building geometries (six courtyards, two canyons, two slabs) on heat mitigation and aircraft noise attenuation, in order to support an evidence-based retrofit plan for future airport neighborhoods. Using ’Pachyderm + ENVI-met simulations + field measurements’, we found that the slanted-roof, low-rise courtyard exhibited optimal acoustic-thermal performance (SPLmin = 71.1 dB(A), σU T CI < 5 ◦C), while the mid-rise canyon demonstrated limited performance (SPLmin = 93.4 dB(A), σU T CI > 10 ◦C). These findings were observed under averaged boundary conditions of a 140 dB(A) aircraft sound source and a diurnal MRT range of 60 ◦C on a heatwave day in July 2022.@en

Analyzing the impact of aircraft noise on urban areas requires specific consideration of sound propagation over long distances, which is not typically covered by tools designed for indoor acoustics. Although it is unclear to what extent existing parametric tools that combine 3D modeling and acoustic simulation can accurately replicate these spatial scales, they provide a valuable means of exploring design options and optimizing performance. One such tool, Pachyderm, a numerical model based on geometrical acoustics, was used to simulate a field lab near Schiphol Airport to assess its applicability for urban acoustics simulation. The simulation results were compared to in-situ measurements, with a focus on differentiating the effect of air noise attenuation based on varying building shapes and the accuracy of the resulting sound pressure level values. The most decisive factors in reducing noise in the courtyard were found to be the building’s orientation and slope relative to the sound source. However, as the design complexity increased with the addition of features such as shielding, the accuracy of the simulation results decreased.@en