The influence of external environment characteristics on the heating and cooling load of super-tall residential building

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. Therefore, upper floors of super-tall residential buildings are expected to have different heating and cooling load characteristics as compared to low-rise residential buildings. In this study, the influence of external environment characteristics due to the high-rise on the heating and cooling loads of super-tall buildings were analysed. EnergyPlus was used for dynamic load analysis simulation, which showed that upper floors of super-tall residential building would have different heating and cooling load characteristic compared to low-rise building and low floors of super-tall building due to solar radiation and airtightness. In addition, it was expected that upper floor of super-tall residential building had different sensible heat ratio than low-rise residential building. 
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