Optimum thermal design of office buildings

Abstract

SUMMARYProper design and selection of building components at the early stages of the design process can greatly help in achieving thermal comfort with minimum reliance upon HVAC systems and, therefore, minimum energy requirements. Given today's complexities in building design as well as advances in computer technology, optimization techniques can be used as an aid to building designers in their decision making process. Office buildings are characterized by being 'internal-load' dominated with internal heat generation determining the need for energy to air-condition such buildings. This paper presents the results of applying an optimization model to the design of energy conserving office buildings in different climatic regions to test the impact of mainly envelope related parameters on the thermal performance of offices. Optimum sets of building design variables for three different sizes office building in four U.S. and two Saudi Arabian cities are presented with the objective of minimizing annual energy consumption for those buildings.

Sensitivity analysis of demand-side management impact on Abu-Dhabi’s electricity consumption

“…In the United Kingdom, more than 60% of the energy consumption is used for indoor climate control with large potential of energy savings by energy efficiency [4]. A study for Saudi Arabia, a similar climate as presented here, showed that 15%, 19% and 40% annual energy can be saved in large, medium and small office buildings through envelope thermal optimization in the hot-humid climate of Riyadh, also for the city of Jeddah, annual energy savings of 8%, 12% and 24% can be obtained for large, medium, and small offices, respectively [5] available as there are many untapped opportunities in this area [6], [7].…”

Cluster analysis of simulated energy use for LEED certified U.S. office buildings

“…Traditionally, buildings are classified as three different groups of small-, medium-, and large-sized buildings based on their area [13,39]. This study considers the energy use patterns of the buildings to develop three clusters based on the building energy use, enabling to correlate the building energy use with the key influential variables.…”

Comprehensive analysis on thermal and daylighting performance of glazing and shading designs on office building envelope in cooling-dominant climates

“…Through large number of case simulations, the effect of indoor temperature setting point on the daylighting performance of windows was studied by Kontoleon & Bikas [18], and they claimed that the glazed opening percentages had a huge effect on thermal performance of the buildings. Al-Homound also simulated the daylighting performance under different climate situation and made interesting analysis with other experimental studies [19].…”