Dynamic Climate Analysis for early design stages: a new methodological approach to detect preferable Adaptive Opaque Façade Responses

Abstract

Main stream design approaches for low-energy buildings make use of highly-insulated building envelopes. However, if facades are always blocking energy exchange, the climatic resources surrounding the built environment might remain untapped or issues like overheating could arise. By reducing energy demand or improving indoor comfort, adaptive opaque facades are considered a promising sustainable alternative. The usual approach for designing adaptive facades relies on detailed simulations of specific facade components. Such technology-oriented approaches tend to be incompatible with the early-stage design process and do rarely make a conscious analysis of the potential climatic resources, which could result in sub-optimal facade adaptation strategies. This paper presents a new methodological approach called Dynamic Climate Analysis (DCA) and shows that it is possible to narrow down the preferable adaptive opaque facade responses at early design stages by extracting relevant transient information from weather files. Users only define the location, geometry and placement of the facade. It was concluded that DCA represents a broadly useful early-stage design decision support because of its ability to estimate the proportion of preferred adaptive thermal behaviours without proposing defined technological solutions. Therefore, DCA is an effective approach to test the potential application of upcoming responsive technologies in specific built contexts.