Development and Validation of a Roadmap to Assist the Performance-Based Early-Stage Design Process of Adaptive Opaque Facades

Miren Juaristi,Aurora Monge-Barrio,Thaleia Konstantinou,Tomás Gómez-Acebo

doi:10.3390/su122310118

Miren Juaristi, Aurora Monge-Barrio + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su122310118

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Abstract

Adaptive Opaque Facades (AOF) is an innovative concept with potential to achieve low carbon energy buildings. However, so far AOF are not integrated in the construction industry. One remarkable issue that designers have when dealing with alternative low-carbon technologies, such as AOF, is the absence of previous built experiences and the lack of specialised technical knowledge. Design roadmaps can be convenient solutions to guide pioneer low carbon technology applications. This work presents a roadmap to assist the performance-based early-stage design process of Adaptive Opaque Facades. Previous research developed new approaches and tools to assist on the construction definition of AOF, so that their adaptive thermal performance was considered when specific design decisions needed to be made. The roadmap presented in this paper organises the implementation sequence of each methodological approach and tools in different design stages, which aims to provide a holistic design approach for AOF. The usability of the roadmap was validated in a workshop called “Performance-based Design and Assessment of Adaptive Facades” with master students representing the target group of this roadmap. Even though these students had never heard about AOF before, they could successfully design, define the early-stage characteristics of an AOF and quantify the thermal performance of their AOF designs. The roadmap was proven to be a useful support, which might make the implementation of AOF more approachable in the future.

Highlights

These documents are useful to decide which type of Adaptive Opaque Facades (AOF) should be applied, where AOF should be placed, to select suitable technologies and AOF typologies, to assist on the quantification of the thermal performance and to evaluate if the achieved performance benefits deserve the additional complexity that implies the integration of dynamic technologies
With the information that is available at early design stages, dynamic climate analysis (DCA) is able to estimate the rate of preferred adaptive thermal behaviors, without detailing and simulating specific dynamic technologies
Group 3 was the one capable of meeting better all the requirements of the proposed task. They first detected through the DCA employment that in Buenos Aires, a North facade with a 34◦ inclinations from the vertical axis was a promising placement for an AOF which was capable of varying the solar absorptance (SA) of the cladding and the thermal Resistance of the opaque component (R)

Summary

Introduction

Several Parametric Design Processes have been developed to facilitate the design of bioclimatic kinetic envelopes, as they can inform about the performance effects when facade shape is changed autonomously [5,6,7,8] They are applicable to responsive skins or adaptive transparent facade design so that designers can quantify the impact of applying these facades in different climates and orientations [9,10] and can understand the consequences of changing some of the responsive technologies features or characteristics [11]. Roadmaps can be valid methods to consider holistically specific technologies in the design process, as they propose a workflow and point out the particular design-considerations and constrains They proved to be useful to promote the achievement of zero- and positive-energy buildings and neighbourhoods [23,24] or to consider energy efficiency in residential building envelope retrofitting [25]. Hierarchy process-based systems and mapping systems can be helpful when performing life cycle assessment of building technologies at early design stages [26,27]

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