The double roof as a rainwater collector in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

Abstract

The fresh water supply is a problem in various parts of the world. The shortage of this resource is evident, as seen by the World Economic Forum´s Global Risks Report (2018) which states that in the last decade the water crisis has always been one of the top five global risks in terms of social impact. This problem is not foreign to Mexico and much less so to Ciudad Juárez where this research was carried out. Visualizing this problem from an architectural point of view, there is a need to create sustainable buildings that can mitigate the overexploitation of the water table. Therefore, the idea to ​​use a double roof system as a rainwater collector was developed, and a multifunctional model with efficient rainwater catchment and better thermal behavior was created. To validate these first steps, an applied quantitative study was carried out in which three experimental models were developed to measure the amount of rainwater harvested and the thermal behavior within the models, in order to compare the combination of the double roof with and without rainwater catchment.