Abstract

Most of the heat gain and loss occur through the building facade as it separates outdoor from indoor conditions. Adapting with nature is one of the sustainable and effective strategies in order to reduce building energy consumption. As the sun angle changes over time and differs in various latitudes, designing an interactive building facade capable of adapting itself to outdoor conditions will improve the efficiency of indoor conditions and save a significant amount of energy. Identifying the trade-off between heating and cooling loads and lighting energy use is always challenging, especially for buildings with small facades such as residential buildings. In this study, an interactive building facade is designed for a residential building to adapt to the sun angle and consequently strike a balance between energy loads. As the result of this study, an adaptable building façade is proposed to minimize the total building energy consumption. A simulation-based energy optimization method is applied to achieve the goal. In this process, an optimization code is developed in Microsoft Visual Studio and coupled with EnergyPlus (i.e., energy simulation) software to identify the trade-off between energy loads of a residential building. The proposed interactive facade using movable Photo Voltaic (PV) panels is designed in DesignBuilder software (i.e., a graphical interface for EnergyPlus software) to identify the optimum position of movable panels. The results show that by using the proposed interactive façade, the annual energy consumption of the building is decreased by 44 percent and 8000 kWh is also generated on-site in comparison with the baseline model.