A review of underground building towards thermal energy efficiency and sustainable development

Global warming has posed a great challenge to the survival of mankind. The increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is widely recognized as the largest contributor of global warming. Hence, world-wide attention towards energy conservation has grown markedly to reduce the carbon dioxide emission. In the context of building energy performance, the ancient wisdom of using the earth as temperature moderator against harsh weather has impressive potential to become a solid solution against the energy inefficiency of Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning system (HVAC) in building. This creative and traditional passive cooling technique has been also made it possible to achieve most criteria of sustainable development concerning the world's growing housing demand, climate change, fossil-fuel depletion as well as limited land area and resources. In this paper, underground buildings were reviewed from preliminary aspects such as historical background, classification and subsequent thermal energy performance criteria. It has tried to elaborate the thermal performance variables, and conduct further study of benefits and drawbacks of this passive cooling technique toward different perspectives of sustainable development. With intention to gain wide acceptance in the modern society, this paper has proposed a conceptual design of earth sheltered home, which incorporated different types of the building techniques. Eventually earth sheltered buildings worldwide were summarized in a well illustrative form to highlight the different designs, applications, locations, timelines and climates. In addition, a deductive model is graphically represented for the virtual overview of underground structures that set the foundation to further investigate sustainability of this building envelope technique. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.