Predicting Energy Demand discrepancies in building simulation under climate change for thermally sensitive mental health care environments

In the UK, Dementia residential assessment hospitals are built to assess needs of people living with late-stage dementia and behaviours that challenges, where personalized care plans are drawn. Indoor Environments are designed to mimic home environments with a medical setting that compensates for sensory and physical loss. Poor homeostasis is a condition of ageing, people living with late-stage dementia express thermal discomfort, among other heath confounders, using agitation and aggression as a proxy. To reduce agitation and provide thermal comfort, previous research concluded that indoor environments need to be maintained between a narrow range of 22-24C. In a time when the National Health Services’ (NHS) ambition is to be the first in the world to reduce its ‘Carbon Footprint’ to reach net Zero by 2040, critical care in mental health environments requiring more stable and narrowly controlled indoor thermal environments will depend on rigorous building simulation analysis and passive architectural design that delivers this challenging strategy.

This research investigates the discrepancies of assessing energy demand using two established data sets for current and climate change Test Reference years. To remove confounders of inappropriate design on results and provide generalizability, an award-winning facility in the North East of England is used as a case study to assess changes on building energy intensity per m2.

The comparative assessment of how passively a ‘Base Case’ performs for under/overheating for current energy predictions, will use CIBSE climate change Test Reference Year (TRY) and the recently established Global TMYx .CIBSE weather files use a baseline from 1984-2013, to present the 2020 climate profile. While the Global TMYx dataset is a typical meteorological data derived from hourly weather data for the NorthEast of England from 2007- 2021. The TMYx database is integrated with NOAA’s Integrated Surface Database (ISD), the TMY/ISO 15927-4:2005 (ISO. 20025. ISO 15927-4:2005 Hygrothermal performance of buildings. The solar data for each site has corresponding solar radiation from the ERA5 reanalysis data set. Impacts of climate change on indoor environments are then scaled to the CIBSE Climate Database weather profiles for 2050,2080. The comparative simulations results are validated by a 3 minute interval indoor measured dataset collated over 15th months during the Welcome Trust funded Project ARCADIA.