Thermal performance of building attached sunspace in Jordan climate

The thermal performance of a sunspace attached to living room located in Amman -Jordan has been investigated in the present study. DEROB- LTH is used to estimate the thermal performance in terms of cooling and heating loads required for the indoor climate. The annual heating and cooling loads are obtained under climatological prevalent conditions. The main contribution of this passive solar design is to reduce heating loads in winter and to minimize overheating during summer period. Six configurations that differ by the ratio of glazed surface area to opaque surfaces area are studied. The effect of orientation of sunspace, opaque wall and floor absroptivity coefficients and number of glass layers on the thermal performance is evaluated. Results show that the sunspace reduces the heating load during the winter while it creates a serious overheating problem during summer. The contribution of reducing heating requirement increases with increasing the ratio of glazed surface to opaque surface area. Also the optimal contribution obtained when sunspace oriented to the south. Two passive cooling techniques are proposed and evaluated to overcome the summer overheating problem. Also, a passive heating technique is proposed to minimize the thermal losses during winter nighttime. Internal shading and night ventilation successfully minimize the overheating problem. Employing the three passive techniques with sunspace, results show that as high as 42% reductions in annual heating and cooling load can be achieved when single clear glass sunspace oriented to the south.