IMPROVEMENTS TO THERMAL COMFORT IN LOW-INCOME HOUSING IN MALAYSIA

Malaysia, a developing country, has a continuing need to provide increasing numbers of low-income housing to accommodate families who migrate from rural to urban areas in search of work. The houses should ideally be built from sustainable materials and incorporate technologies that work with the climate to provide thermal comfort for the occupants. They should also be affordable and suit the social and cultural customs of the people. The paper investigates the current situation on the provision of thermal comfort in a typical low-income house built in Malaysia. The investigation was carried out by measuring airflow rates, temperatures, relative humidity and mean radiant temperature at specific points in the house. Results are presented and analysed using the Corrected Effective Temperature (CET) Index and show that the typical low-income house often failed to provide thermal comfort. A series of technical design improvements are then recommended to improve the thermal comfort inside the house. These are evaluated by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the CET Index. The results show that thermal comfort in a house can be improved by incorporating construction details, which improve the airflow through the house, without increasing the cost.