The past analyses carried on about this city have shown the fact that for the city of Colombo it is basically not possible to define an ‘heating season’, being the average dry bulb temperature of January, that is the coldest month, almost 27 °C. For this reason the design strategies of such an hot climate have as common aim the reduction of cooling energy needs and the de-humidification of the indoor space; these studies have to be carried on always taking care of the different thermal comfort ranges and perceived temperatures of the two different locations, related to people habits and culture.
We wanted to analyse how we could act on different thermal transfer means in order to achieve the goal of reducing energy needs for cooling.
Conduction/Convection/Radiation In terms of conductive and convective heat transfer modes, the best idea in this situation is to increase the heat transfer from indoor environment to the outside. This can be reached acting on the properties of the external partitions or also or glazing characteristics. For example, in this hot climate it would be helpful to use a glazing type that is able to reflect solar radiation coming from the sun but at the same time to let the heat flow from inside to outside without creating a green-house effect; this can be obtained, for example, with a glazing type that is reflective in its external layer but not on the inner side.