Exploring the potential use of building facade information to estimate energy performance

Abstract

In spite of prolific research on the energy performance of buildings in the last decades, and the growing focus on reducing their operational energy, buildings still prevail as the main end users of energy in the U.S. The goal of this research is to investigate the potential use of building facade information to estimate its energy performance, and to find significant facade attributes depending on different climate conditions in the U.S. This study adopted Energy Use Intensity (EUI) for total consumption and described building information, including window-wall ratio, orientation, aspect ratio, and other building components. Concentration was given to achieve a balanced data collection from best practices and green certified non-residential projects located in different climate conditions in the U.S. Data mining techniques, such as classification tree and statistical tools that included Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), a 2-sample t-test, and regression, were adopted for analysis of this group of buildings. It was found that there were common functional and technical features, as well as similar performances of existing buildings linked to these buildings’ energy consumption. These findings could not only inform the new design of facades, but facade retrofits could be strategically established based on lessons learned from real practice.