Sunday, April 1, 2012

The paper coauthored with Anagh  has been published in the proceedings of National Level Symposium (Festival of Architecture & Built Environment-10th &11th Feb. 2012) organized by SRM University, Chennai. (ISBN: 978-81-8424-755-8 Published by Allied publishers private Limited-Chennai) 

Energy Saving By Optimizing Facade Elements with Spread Sheet Model.
Abstract: A major component of energy requirements for cooling and heating comes through facade elements of a habitat. Bulk of this huge energy requirement can be reduced through optimum orientation and detailing of building facade elements. The graphical methods available for calculating the energy inputs are lengthy and cumbersome.Hourly heat ingress or loss quantification over the year makes such manual methods  impractical. The popular energy software are black boxes requiring inflexible and voluminous data entries and are not suited for optimizing individual facade elements.


The paper models façade elements through Excel which is the most popular spread sheet application. A basic solar model using the well-known formula generates the altitude and azimuth angles for all 8760 hours of the year. The direct solar intensities at any hour for a given orientation are worked out by factoring the observed Direct Normal Solar Radiation with calculated altitude and azimuth. The ease in spread sheet application use and instant graphical results makes the model very suitable for creating energy scenarios for variously oriented facade elements. The effect of different orientations, shadings and other parameters thus evaluated can be tabulated for further value analysis considering all aspects including the energy savings.
Key Words: Energy Efficiency, Fenestrations, Green Buildings, Horizontal Shadow Angle (HSA), Solar Motion Geometry, Façade, Vertical Shadow Angle (VSA)