Experimental Investigation of Green Façade Components for Industrial and Storage Buildings

Abstract

This paper deals with vertical greenery applied on the external side of lightweight walls for industrial and storage buildings. The greenery is expected to have some positive impacts on the building performance, in particular reduction of building energy consumption and peak cooling power. The achievable benefits are however dependent on local climatic conditions, hygro-thermal properties of the building enclosure, the requirements for the indoor environment and on the system of greenery applied on the walls. The side-by-side real-scale experiment involving three different test walls was built in two test windows with dimensions of 3.0 x 3.2 m. A climatic test room with controlled indoor environment is located behind test windows. Two reference walls present current standard technical solutions constructed as metal frame filled with thermal insulation with metal sheets on the exterior side, either in direct contact with core wall or with ventilated air gap. The third wall replaces the external metal sheets by the system of baskets filled by soil substrate and greenery with integrated irrigation pipes. The experiment was built in June 2019 and is extensively monitored since beginning of July 2019. Temperatures, relative humidity, heat fluxes, moisture content of soil substrate, inflow and outflow of irrigation water, and environmental boundary conditions are continuously recorded. Results of the first year of monitoring are presented and discussed in the paper. The measured results showed reduction of daily peak values of heat flux on the internal surface during hot summer days and evaluated power of evaporative cooling.