ماریا کرد جمشیدی

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 sهادیng 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.

There has long been a concern that evaluating building thermal performance on the basis of energy loads is inappropriate to achieve overall energy efficiency of houses, particularly passive houses, in temperate climates. Passive buildings designed to be free running may achieve better results in an appropriate evaluation system. The main objective of this study is to investigate differences between thermal performances of houses in different operation modes. The paper illustrates a relationship between indicators of building performance in free running and conditioned modes. Simulation is used to compare the predicted performances of conditioned and free running houses, respectively on the basis of annual energy requirements (MJ/m2) and Degree Discomfort Hours (DDH) in temperate climate of Babolsar, Iran. Despite a strong relationship between these two indicators, some significant differences become clear leading to a discussion of the persistent technical problems and issues, which are encountered when attempting to optimize an efficient architectural design. The result of this study persuades the architects to pay more attention to the process of building energy efficient design regarding to the building operation mod. Application of this result in the building labelling system can promote the passive building design which is an important step to achieve objectives of sustainable development.