A STUDY OF GREEN ENVELOPE OF THE BUILDING IN HOT AND HUMID CLIMATE

Abstract

This paper addresses the impact of green envelope-to-total gross floor area (GFA) ratio on the overall energy savings of a green envelope design over conventional envelope designs. Energy consumption of a building has recently become the important issue to be discussed in the building industry to build a greener living environment. According to Singapore's National Climate Change Committee (NCCC) [1], most of the energy consumed by a building is used to remove the heat, which is transmitted into the building from the external environment, to achieve the thermal comfort of the occupants; especially the building located in hot and humid climate regions likes Singapore.

By understanding on how a green envelope works, the influences on the building’s energy consumption by the green envelope will be monitored with the support of the advanced computer energy simulation software likes Visual Doe, which is developed by Architectural Energy Corporation. With the help of Visual Doe, inputting the envelope’s design parameters, such as the properties of the wall, whether or not there will be a positive or negative influence on the thermal performance of the overall building with respect to different value combination of the total green envelope area and the GFA of the building will be identified. In addition, the ratio of the total green envelope area and GFA that achieves the best thermal performance will be determined too. At the end of the research, the energy consumption of the Heat and Ventilation Air Conditional (HVAC) system of a building with different ratio of total greened envelope area and total floor area will be investigated.