Study of the climate-responsive design of Omani vernacular architecture for future sustainable building design: Coupling of CFD and building energy simulation

Houses are the main buildings in Oman and the main energy consumer as well. This because most of the house's designs are coming from a western background and they can't adapt with hot arid climate of Oman. So the houses achieve thermal comfort by using cooling systems which consume a lot of energy to run. This consumption is increasing with time because of the growth in population and this consumption eventually will negatively affect the economic growth in Oman. In the same time if we exam the traditional architecture one can find that they build in a way to achieve thermal comfort with only the using of passive cooling means like shading, ventilation, etc. The returning to traditional housing is difficult due to the vanishing of the designs information and expertise because of stop using for a long time. However, we still have the buildings that built in that era which we can study them and numerically simulate them by using the computers to extract the information which we can use to enhance the designs of new houses. Researchers did many attempts to simulate the houses by numerical programming however most of them were by using building performance simulation software?s like TRNSYS and Energy+, this research will include a new method for simulation by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This method is more accurate than other methods and give much more data to analysis however it complicated and need more time and computational power in comparing with other methods. The aim of this research is to study the traditional houses in Oman by using numerical way to devise some new recommendations for architecture design of modern houses to make it more efficient and to reflect the long heritage of construction in the region.