Double-Skin Façade for Energy Performance and Thermal Comfort in Hot/Humid Climate Highrise Office Buildings

Abstract

Dubai is one of the hot-humid regions characteristic with lots of high-rises buildings that consume lots of energy. In 2010 Dubai was mentioned as one of the cities with the biggest ecological footprint in the world and since that Dubai started to introduce green building evaluation systems and building codes to reach sustainability and reduce energy consumption. The commercial sector in Dubai consumes around 47.52% of the energy and 30% of this energy in the commercial building is used for a conventional cooling system. The question is can we generate a building-integrated system that will generate energy and achieve human thermal comfort without relying on conventional systems to cool the building? According to research building performance save half of the energy from natural ventilation applications. Natural ventilation is considered one important strategy that uses the unlimited resource of wind. The unlimited source in Dubai city is 8.5mph throughout the year. This research will introduce a new system called breathing in the wind system that stop the dependency on the conventional cooling system and let the building be more breathable by developing a double-skin façade that uses the wind power, solar power, maintain views, use natural ventilation to reach the human thermal comfort in the space and shading. Natural ventilation will be used all year round by applying two modes that depend on the availability of wind in Dubai city. In addition, develop methods of using software for natural ventilation analysis in buildings such as eQuest Energy Simulation, and physical modeling.