The Modification of Buildings Based on the Mounds of Macrotermes for the Purposes of Thermoregulation and the Elimination of the Need for Modern Air Conditioning

Abstract

The current way that the air conditioning of buildings is conducted is both overly expensive and harmful to the environment. Alternatives to modern air conditioning are not common, but one potential solution lies in the deserts of Zimbabwe. Macrotermes, a genus of termites found in this region, produce mounds that thermoregulate independently. The Eastgate Centre, a building in Zimbabwe, was designed to imitate this process and function without modern AC. The goal of this research is to find a way apply the same techniques to buildings that already exist. To test the potential of this, a scale model building with an added chimney and fans (similar to the Eastgate Centre) was compared to a similar model without modifications when exposed to a heat lamp that was representative of the sun. The temperatures at each level of each building were recorded over a number of trials with the light facing eight different sides of the building for five minutes. The differences in temperature between room temperature and the temperature after the light exposure were calculated and showed that, on average, the modified building resulted in a smaller difference than the control building. The mean for the modified building was 4.2583°C, while the mean for the modified building was 5.075°C. An ANOVA was run on the data that verified the design’s promise and, therefore, suggested that it deserves further investigation, perhaps on a larger scale.