“PET tool” – a software tool for lightweight extensive green roofs performance analyses

Abstract

Due to energy, environmental, and social benefits, green roofs are recognized as a bioclimatic technology and sustainable construction systems and are becoming a predominant solution in connection with urban planning and building envelope retrofitting. To support design and marketing of Urbanscape® lightweight extensive green roofs a special software tool was developed, which is presented in the paper. Performance evaluation tool (PET tool) is validated based on extensive and continuous 5-years in-situ monitoring of thermal and hydrological response of different Urbanscape green roofs. The key performance indicators of Urbanscape green roofs are evaluated based on calculated thermal and hydrological response. To emphasize the advantages of green roofs thermal response and performance indicators are determined also for non-vegetated roof for the same boundary conditions. PET tool enables i) evaluation of Urbanscape green roofs’ whole year thermal and hydrological response, ii) to search for the optimal design of the Urbanscape green roof system in terms of energy and water performance, iii) evaluation of comparative advantages compared to non-vegetated roof, iv) energy savings and CO2 emission reduction analyses for heating and cooling season. Analyses can be made for arbitrary worldwide climate conditions since meteorological parameters are gathered from Meteonorm database.