solar radiation

Upper floors of super-tall residential buildings have different characteristics of the exterior environment as compared to their low floors or low-rise residential buildings due to the high-rise. Upper floors are more affected by direct solar radiation due to the reduced number of adjacent shading buildings and by reflected solar radiation from rooftops. Super-tall buildings also have high level of airtightness because of higher wind speed with high-rise.

Adaptive thermal comfort model has been widely used to evaluate the thermal comfort level of natural ventilation buildings.However, current adaptive standards offer a simple linear relationship between the outdoor temperature and the indoor comfort temperature，ignoring the influence of solar radiation.

According to an advancement of exergy research in relations to thermal comfort and built environment for the last fifteen years, the availability of “warm” or “cool” radiant exergy emitted by the interior surfaces of building envelope systems is crucially important in providing building occupants with adaptive opportunity for thermal comfort both in summer and in winter. This paper demonstrates some numerical examples showing how the thermal performance of window systems affects the availability of “warm” and “cool” radiant exergies.

This paper describes an outdoor-indoor thermal investigation of a multifamily residential building during summer in Cairo, Egypt. Initially, microclimate meteorological data was generated for an urban settlement with and without trees being incorporated in to the development.  The software ENVI-met was used for this first stage. Two kinds of tree planting (15m high Ficus Elastica and 20m Yellow Poinciana) were simulated, together with the existing scenario that has no trees.

This paper describes CFD modelling of Double Skin Façades (DSF) with venetian blinds inside the façade cavity. The 2-D modelling work investigates the coupled convective, conductive and radiative heat transfer through the DSF system. The angles of the venetian blind can be adjusted and a series of angles (0, 30, 45, 60 and 80 degrees) has been modelled. The modelling results are compared with the measurements from a section of façade tested within a solar simulator and with predictions from a component based nodal model. Agreement between the three methods is generally good.

While people need to know tomorrow’s weather to decide suitable activities and precautions, so do the “intelligent” building management systems. The accuracy of the short-term prediction of the ambient conditions is particularly import for the development  of predictive control strategies.

Given the major role played by windows with regard to energy losses and gains from buildings in respectively cold and hot climates, accurate prediction of the heat transfer through its glazing materials is of great importance in building energy simulation. In most of the building energy simulation programs, solar radiation absorption inside glazing layers is usually treated considering that all the radiation is uniformly absorbed in the glazing.

The paper presents a study on the thermal behavior of a solar greenhouse set against one apartment of a residential eco-sustainable building in a temperate climate. Particular attention was given to the analysis of the contribution of solar radiation in winter heating in relation to natural ventilation. This study makes use of a transient energy simulation system named ESP-r (Environmentals System Performance - research).

The energy performance of solar-control film on single window glass is analyzed through in-siteexperiment measurement. The solar optical properties and the heat transfer characteristics of theglazing with solar-control film are discussed in detail. An experiment was carried out to compare theenergy consumption and day lighting level between two hotel guest rooms with and without solarcontrolfilm. The theoretical and experimental results have a good agreement in the energy saved bysolar-control film.

An important part of IEA 34/43 is concerning validation of building simulation models.