Balcony ventilation: Utilising wing wall to enhance natural ventilation of double-storey terrace house in Malaysia / Fatin Nursyafiqah Khairul Anuar

For generations, natural ventilation is the most efficient passive strategy for regulating the indoor temperature, hence providing healthy indoor environment. However, in contemporary architecture, natural ventilation is not being exploited to its maximum potential, particularly in landed houses. The efficacy of natural ventilation can be affected by a number of factors, especially façade treatments such as balconies. As balconies have been extensively introduced into dwellings for a variety of functions, nevertheless, the provision of a balcony as a passive design solution to improve natural ventilation is not among them. Moreover, a building with a deep layout plan such as terrace houses, in particular, a single-sided ventilation strategy is inevitable, resulting in a substantially reduced ventilation efficiency compared to a cross-ventilation strategy. Consequently, the performance of balcony ventilation can be significantly improved by incorporating wing walls into balcony design, since wing walls are an effective facade treatment for increasing the ventilation flow rate of single-sided openings. This study therefore aims to propose wing wall for balconies to improve natural ventilation performance of double-storey terrace houses in Malaysia. Hence, there are three objectives that were addressed in this study. The first objective is to investigate the wing wall configurations that enhance the balcony ventilation in terrace houses. This was achieved through a rigorous searching effort via Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in identifying the pertinent publications that studies on the impact of balcony design and its integration with wing walls. SLR were then followed by identifying balcony design that perceives unsteady airflow performance through structured observation on the existing balconies of double-storey terrace houses within Taman Cheng Setia, Malacca.