Assessing Resiliency and Passive Survivability in Multifamily Buildings

Resilient building design is becoming increasingly important as occurrence and duration of extreme weather events increase. These events cause disruptions in building operation and safety due to lack of electric power or fuel. Several resilient design strategies exist, many of which are also sustainable or energy saving design strategies. Specifically, passive building strategies that favor energy conservation in buildings also have a positive impact on the building’s resilience. Passive survivability is a key element to resilience, which can be assessed by simulating interior conditions during power outages in building energy modeling software. This paper will address passive survivability metrics and assessment protocol for passive survivability including a proposed methodology to derive climatic resilience design weeks. Additionally, it will cover simulation results from dynamic modeling completed in WUFI Plus. These simulations assess passive survivability during power outages in varying multifamily building designs and inform the audience on how building design influences a building’s ability to maintain desirable interior conditions during outages.