An Efficient Double Skin Façade for an Office Building in Shiraz City

Abstract

Energy efficiency in office buildings has been the center of attention for many researches. This special attention is due to highly energy consumption in this building type. Refinement of facade and building's envelop is a good approach to reduce buildings energy requirements. Double skin facade concepts are commonly used to achieve that object. Although the concept is not new, there is a growing tendency from the architects to put it into practice. However inappropriate selection of technical parameters in this kind of façade, such as its interior/ exterior openings, layers, materials and shading device would lead to reverse expected results. The objective of this study is to improve and optimize the thermal performance of an office building in hot and dry climate. For this purpose a suitable double skin façade concept is designed to reduce the building's annual energy requirements. This concept is optimized by integrating with a windcatcher. The optimization is performed based on simulating a designed office building by Energy Plus software. The results revealed that double skin façade integrated with wind catcher can significantly reduce annual energy requirement by 26.65%. The proposed solution can be considered as an effective platform for sustainable architecture and reduction of energy consumption.