Indoor Thermal Environment of Temporary Mobile Energy Shelter Houses (MeSHs) in South Korea

Temporary housing must be developed to support the long-term residence needs of disaster victims. The present study assesses a temporary housing unit, the so-called Mobile Energy Shelter House (MeSH), incorporating the Korean Dwelling Insulation Standard in order to reduce energy usage for cooling and heating. To assess energy performance, the characteristics of the indoor thermal environment were measured during the winter and summer seasons. In summer, at maximum insolation, the outdoor temperature was 37.6 degrees C and the indoor temperature of the MeSH ranged from 18 to 24 degrees C when the cooling system was not used. Conversely, during winter, the average outdoor temperature was -11.3 degrees C and the indoor temperature ranged from 16.09 to 20.63 degrees C when a temperature-controlled floor-heating was installed. Furthermore, the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) was adopted to determine whether the ISO 7730 comfort criterion (i.e., PMV range from -0.5 to +0.5) was achieved. Based on the calculations presented here, PMV in summer ranged from -1.21 to +1.07 and that in winter ranged from -0.08 to -0.85, suggesting that the thermal environment is not always comfortable for occupants in either summer or winter. Nevertheless, the ISO comfort criterion can be achieved through varying air velocity in summer and changing clothing characteristics in winter. A comparison between yearly energy demand of existing characteristic temporary housing (Shelter House) and the MeSH modules used in this study was performed. The simulation results show a 60% difference in energy demand between MeSH and existing temporary housing shelter houses.