Generally, there are two approaches to designing eco-houses. 'The Middle East countries are developing eco-friendly residential architecture in response to the high demand on the housing sector as the population of the region is expected to grow by about 50 million people over the next decade (The World Bank 2012, 42-46) and to high energy demand as the region tries to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. The comparison of software for the temperature simulation is discussed in this paper. The findings show that IES has higher accuracy compared to Autodesk Ecotect in term of percentage differences. The mentioned software are discussed and the simulated results were compared. In order to validate the software application for future research in order to save time, operation cost and consideration of flexibility of experimentation work, Autodesk ECOTECT® and Integrated Environment Solution (IES) has been selected. However, the low percentage of thermal performance out of 15 days has directly indicated the disadvantages of single-sided ventilation especially between 10:00 to 16:00 hours. The critical time for the indoor temperature was around noon hours. The average air movement at night was 0.4m/s and the average relative humidity was 80%.

The comfort condition occurs between 21:00 and 07:00, which falls in the range of 24.5✬ to 27✬. The study shows that the single-sided ventilation room was thermally comfortable for about 35.9% out of 335 hours in 15 days based on ASHRAE experiment in Singapore 1952. A case study of a typical office room was carried out in UTM campus in Johor Bahru with field measurement conducted for 15 days in naturally ventilated office space. The effectiveness of the thermal performance of single-sided ventilated room is been validated in order to mark out the maximum range of temperature and relative humidity in a single-sided ventilation room. This paper discussed the study of thermal performance of the single-sided ventilation room by comparing two simulation software results and field experiment result. However, due to limitation of layout efficiency, cost effectiveness, security, and fire requirement, most of the building designed has single-sided ventilation solution.

Cross ventilation strategy is considered as the ideal in order to enhance the thermal performance. An effective passive design strategy for building is necessary especially in hot and humid climate in Malaysia. In Malaysia, 70% of the electricity consumed is for cooling load. In order to reduce energy consumption, effectiveness of natural ventilation performance in building should become major consideration in design. Ventilation is one of the important criteria to achieve thermal comfort in building.

Autodesk ecotect analysis download