Achieving to a low carbon-energy commercial building in the hot-dry climate area

Abstract

ABSTRACT The main source of building energy consumption in Iran is fossil fuels. The building sector, as a result, is responsible for a high share of CO2 emissions in this country. To address the issue, the government has recently adopted the “green management system” policy in order to alleviate the severe rate of CO2 emissions from the government buildings. As a commitment to the policy, the University of Tehran plans to transform into the first green university of Iran through green retrofitting in the coming years. As the first step to the retrofitting process, this paper measures the potential of energy-saving and CO2 emission reduction in the University of Tehran Science & Technology Park (UTSTP) offices with the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM). For this, Building No. 2 of UTSTP is modeled in the environment of DesignBuilder software to provide a calibrated computational model for energy and carbon audit. A detailed audit is then conducted using the calibrated model to identify the major areas of energy loss in the case study. Based on the audit results, several green strategies are then proposed to improve the weak performance of building in the identified areas. The strategies include triple glazing windows, aerogel envelope, phase change material (PCM) insulation, and Trombe wall. Findings suggest that the thermal loss from the building structure as a result of insufficient levels of insulation in the building components is the main source of energy loss in the building. Simulation results show that green strategies to a large extent have good energy-saving and mitigation potential. Full implementation of the proposed green strategies would reduce the annual heating needs and CO2 emissions of the case study by 51.6% and 5.39% respectively.