Abstract

The construction industry is one of the largest consumers of energy throughout its life cycle. Reducing energy consumption in the construction industry requires integrating mechanisms in building design. This study explores the use of the second skin of facade (SSOF) as a potential mechanism for reducing energy consumption in an office building. The study focuses on modeling, simulating, and analyzing an optimized SSOF for an office building’s facade and evaluating its impact on both life cycle energy consumption (LCEC) and operational energy consumption (OEC). A two-story open office building was simulated using the Honeybee and Ladybug plugins in Grasshopper 3D and Python programming language to calculate the building’s OEC and LCEC. The study was conducted in three stages. In the first stage, the results were obtained without incorporating SSOF into the facade. In the second stage, SSOF was added to the facade, and the form-related parameters were optimized using the Big Bang–Big Crunch (BB–BC) algorithm to improve OEC. In the final stage, the form of SSOF was optimized to improve LCEC. The results indicated that the implementation of SSOF could lead to a decrease in both OEC and LCEC, although LCEC temporarily increases in the early years of the building’s life span. The results showed that the LCEC decreased by 30 percent in the thirtieth year compared to the baseline scenario, highlighting the long-term benefits of using SSOF. However, it is important to consider the energy required for the production of the materials used in the construction of SSOF for optimal results.