Dynamic Framework to Quantify Thermal Resiliency and Passive Survivability During Prolonged Air Conditioning Outages in Extreme Hot Climate: Arizona Case Study

Saroj Lamichhane

Increasing frequency and severity of extreme heat events, and growing dependence on air-conditioning systems emphasize the need to evaluate thermal resiliency of buildings during cooling outages. Existing thermal resiliency evaluation methodology do not fully capture passive survivability and recovery components. This study aims to develop a comprehensive dynamic framework to evaluate thermal resiliency of residential units during cooling outage situation in extreme hot season using high-resolution, multi-zone field measured data from 2 apartments in Arizona, USA. The frameworks incorporate thermal exposure, delay component, dynamic component, exponential and sinusoidal models and recovery behavior of the apartments during cooling outage duration of up to 78 hours. Results showed that, immediately after the cooling outage, all the zones exhibited exponential behavior in temperature rise rate followed by harmonic behavior after transient hour. The exponential model exhibited strong capability across all zones in both apartments with R2 values ranging from 0.8943 to 0.9833. The sinusoidal regression model exhibited strong capability across monitored zones with R2 values ranging from 0.656 to 0.975. Significant spatial variability was observed between zones and within zones. Recovery analysis showed tradeoff between passive survivability during cooling outage and recovery ability.