Structural engineers have discovered that if you build an apartment building with angled, shark-fin-shaped protrusions on the side where the Sun’s heat is the strongest, the angles keep the building cooler.
It’s one of a variety of simple new building and design elements being proposed for a world where July and August routinely feature stories of droughts, heat waves, and temperature records.
From the dawn of time, humans have been forced to live in hot environs. From the dawn of construction, humans have figured out how to build buildings in a way that takes advantage of thermodynamics to cool them naturally. Many of these are delightful architectural features visible in buildings from antiquity such as the Roman amphitheaters, the Taj Mahal, and the wind towers of Yazd.
Much of that planning was ignored with the advent of the modern age, and homes, whether those of the lower-middle class or the upper-middle class, took on the same character of modular boxes exposed to the mercy of any element that batters them.
In a study from Purdue and Colombia universities, researchers sought to find a simple way to retrofit boxy buildings with features that could help keep them cooler amid rising global temperatures.
One issue their research encountered is that heat hits most urban buildings from two angles—from the sun, and the ground, where cement and asphalt absorb heat and radiate it upwards all day.
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“These two directions require different properties for cool walls,” says Qilong Cheng, a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University who worked on the study as a graduate student at Columbia University. “So we have this two-surface zigzag design, with one surface facing the sky and the other facing the ground.”
The angles, looking a little like the sawtooth roofs of factory rooms, can shave 5.5° Fahrenheit off average indoor temperatures.
Radiation coming up from the ground is reduced or deflected by one material, while heat from the sun is reflected with ultra-white paint.
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Cheng and his colleagues are now looking to patent the design and turn it into a product, perhaps made of corrugated iron which they used in their study and found could reduce HVAC energy usage by 14%.
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