Numerical simulation of a pioneering cool roof system for Asia's roofing system reformation: The alternative cooling measure

Abstract

The existing roofing system in tropical climates is not adapting to the worsening climate, along with the demand for sustainable building design; this study introduced a pioneering cool roof system to reform the traditional roofing system. The pioneering cool roof system is composed of white reflective coating, hollow foamed concrete roof (HFCR) tile, and a sustainable active reflective insulation (RI) system. Despite the complex integrated roof technologies, the study adopted 3D CFD numerical simulation for an in-depth and frontier thermal distribution analysis and fluid flow presentation. The outcomes of the numerical model were compared with field measurements for validation purposes, which resulted in just a 3.31% error. The internal attic was 35.64 °C despite the roof exterior achieving 54.59 °C after receiving an average 680 W/m2 solar radiation source. After the heat flux was hugely terminated by the HFCR tile and sustainable active RI system, the heat flux magnitude attained in the internal attic was 1.0822 W/m2, and the active RI system removed 96.29% of heat flux excellently. Meanwhile, the proposed roofing design's energy-saving performance was 27.5%.

Keywords

• Cool roof
• CFD
• Numerical model
• Building