Thermal Comfort and market niches for apartment buildings: Impact of the current Thermal Regulation in the private real estate market in Santiago de Chile

Santiago (33°27’S; 70°42’W) is the capital city of Chile and presents a Mediterranean climate. With its 6 million inhabitants concentrates 40% of the population of the country and 65.5% of the private real estate market. According to the National Statistics Institute, 37.4% and 36.0% of new housing during 2006 were built using mainly brick masonry and concrete in their walls, respectively. In both cases, thermal insulation is not traditionally considered. However, nowadays apartment buildings in Santiago are including at least 10 or 20 mm of thermal insulation in their walls to give compliance to the Thermal Regulation. This paper proposes a series of dynamic thermal simulations to apartments in Santiago, with the aim of establish their thermal behaviour both in winter and summer. These digital models are statistically based on the typologies belonging to the private real estate market during the period 2003-2009. These were determined using a multivariate analysis of their attributes through the two-stage clustering method. According to the results, the decision of incorporating thermal insulation in the external envelope of apartments in Santiago appears as appropriate to improve winter comfort conditions, and even could be convenient for summer comfort, when it is combined with ventilation strategies. Additionally, there is an important challenge to introduce most restrictive requirements in the regulation. At the same time, it is necessary incorporate other passive cooling techniques, such as solar protection and thermal inertia in the study, to define how it is possible reach summer comfort without the incorporation of air conditioning.