An assessment of climatic design strategy for low energy residential buildings in hot and arid climate

Buildings consume a lot of operational energy primarily due to its cooling requirements. Increasing consumption of energy has led to global warming resulting in ozone layer depletion. The key to conserve energy in buildings is to design buildings according to climate. Since most of the population in India is concentrated in hot and arid region, substantial amount of energy can be conserved using proper climatic design. In this paper basically three important climatic design strategies namely shading, thermal mass and courtyard and their significance in climatic control and conserving energy in residential buildings in hot and arid regions has been discussed.