Energy performance assessment of a naturally ventilated combined shaft-corridor DSF in an office building in Chicago

Abstract

There is a great deal of interest in using double skin facade (DSF) strategies in new and retrofitted buildings, as they provide many possibilities for energy conservation, and at the same time create better thermal comfort. For hundreds of years, architects have tended to rely on intuitive guesses to design naturally ventilated buildings without detailed analyses. The lack of numerical airflow information that demonstrates the complexity and challenges in the domain of designing large naturally ventilated buildings is addressed in the literature reviews. For these types of buildings it is important to have tools for analysis of design to evaluate a design's predicted performance in order to achieve successful natural ventilation concepts. This study attempts to examine if the reliable simulation techniques verify the intuitive flow performance of double skin facades in a new configuration of natural ventilated building that results in reducing the energy demands yet provide both comfortable and healthy environments. The goal of this paper is to compare the base case of a typical office building in Chicago with two conventional DSF configuration and new (combined shaftcorridor) type.