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Advanced Residential and Commercial Building Envelope Systems Evaluation
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Advanced Residential and Commercial Building Envelope Systems Evaluation

A special issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309). This special issue belongs to the section "Building Energy, Physics, Environment, and Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2023) | Viewed by 19557

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Ali M. Memari

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
1. Department of Architectural Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA 16802, USA
2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA 16802, USA
Interests: building energy efficiency; residential and commercial building envelope systems evaluation; building science and energy efficiency of buildings; full-scale structural and environmental testing of building envelope systems; evaluation of building (structural and nonstructural) envelope systems under natural hazard and environmental load effects
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past few decades, Building Envelope (BE) systems have become significantly more complex in response to ever expanding performance expectations with respect to sustainability, energy efficiency, various aspects of serviceability under environmental effects (e.g., rain, snow, wind, thermal radiation) and safety with regard to natural and man-made hazards (hurricane, tornado, earthquake, impact, blast). This requires BE systems be designed not only against applicable structural loads and deformations, but also provide air leakage control, moisture penetration control, solar heat gain or loss control, heat transfer control, and condensation control, besides using materials with low embodied energy. Such multi-performance expectations require involvement of professionals with expertise and experience in different disciplines including architectural design, material selection, system selection, structural design, energy design, fabrication, erection, insulation, and maintenance, among others.

Given that BE systems consist of transparent and opaque components, they cover a wide range of materials such as glazing systems, wood, plastics, masonry, concrete, composites, aluminum, and other light gage metals, assembled with different construction options including site erected stick frame or masonry systems, and prefabricated unitized, precast, and panelized systems. In response to various challenges posed by wide array of expectations, innovative BE systems are in high demand and are being introduced, including double skin façade, rainscreen and pressure equalized concepts, active, dynamic, and adaptive façades, building integrated photovoltaic, vacuum insulated panels, and various coatings for transparent or opaque surfaces such as thermochromic, photochromic, and electrochromic as well as use of phase change material in the BE systems. Besides innovative material and systems, advancements are also underway in design and simulation software development to accurately evaluate energy performance, including thermal bridge, air leakage, and condensation effects, as well as recent interest in various software interfaces and interoperability based on building information modeling.

For this Special Issue of the Buildings Journal, authors are invited to submit papers related to developments in any of the BE areas mentioned and case studies to illustrate application of such advanced technologies

Prof. Dr. Ali Memari
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • building envelope, enclosure, and science
  • curtain wall and window systems
  • double skin façade
  • dynamic and adaptive façade
  • rainscreen
  • pressure equalized envelope
  • envelope energy efficiency

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

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33 pages, 3458 KiB  
Article
Multi-Disciplinary Characteristics of Double-Skin Facades for Computational Modeling Perspective and Practical Design Considerations
by Ali M. Memari, Ryan Solnosky and Chengcong Hu
Buildings 2022, 12(10), 1576; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12101576 - 30 Sep 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3971
Abstract
Vertical building enclosures known as Double-skin façades (DSFs) have become recognized as a promising façade type for buildings that place emphasis on sustainable, green, and energy-efficient design performance. DSFs are highly integrated across engineering and architecture; however, there remain limited centralized knowledge repositories [...] Read more.
Vertical building enclosures known as Double-skin façades (DSFs) have become recognized as a promising façade type for buildings that place emphasis on sustainable, green, and energy-efficient design performance. DSFs are highly integrated across engineering and architecture; however, there remain limited centralized knowledge repositories that offer designers’ insight into these performance trends, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and tradeoff metrics, as well as how to go about modeling DSFs for performance under applicable loading systems when conducting design. As such, the main objective of this paper is to provide a better understanding of different types of DSF systems and their attributes from the perspective of multiple disciplines, as well as different modeling approaches. The methodology adopted is rooted in the principles of systematic literature review of design standards, research papers, and software manual literature, as well as a qualitative evaluation based on structural performance aspects. From the study, many different configurations of DSFs exist that impact each engineered system, where those system attributes impact multiple systems. This results in a need to parametrically iterate configurations within software to find a balance in DSF performance. Furthermore, there exists software easily capable of simulating these systems, yet the designer must carefully construct the models with different levels of sophistication towards DSFs and the software. This paper contains concise summaries of key attributes that designers need to consider when their project has a DSF system, along with different software modelers from which they can choose, correlating to the complexity of the design stage along with the appropriateness of the calculations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Residential and Commercial Building Envelope Systems Evaluation)
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19 pages, 3547 KiB  
Article
Software for the Multi-Criteria Design of the External Walls Based on User Priority
by Jiří Majer, Nikola Vavřínová, Kateřina Stejskalová and Lenka Pentková
Buildings 2022, 12(5), 647; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12050647 - 12 May 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1686
Abstract
The external walls of buildings account for a substantial part of the financial costs of the entire construction, and there can be a loss of up to 35% of thermal energy through them. By properly optimizing the price for the construction of m [...] Read more.
The external walls of buildings account for a substantial part of the financial costs of the entire construction, and there can be a loss of up to 35% of thermal energy through them. By properly optimizing the price for the construction of m2 of the external wall structure and its thermal technical parameters, interesting savings can be achieved. At present, there is no multi-criteria analysis for designing external wall structure compositions involving broader input options according to the user’s technical parameters and priorities. There is a large selection of special software in the Czech and European markets, but the software is focused only on the narrower area of design and ignores the issue of building material prices. The aim of this work is to create an algorithm that reliably finds the composition that best meets the user’s requirements using a wide database of materials and selected mathematical methods. This article presents an algorithm that would design the ideal composition of an external wall. This algorithm has two options for searching. The first is based on eight technical criteria and the prices of materials used in combination with user priorities. The second option is to find the best composition based only on the specified interval of the selected technical parameters. Materials databases and the use of existing computational methods, such as the Saaty method and the WSM—weighted sum method, applied to the algorithm are essential to find the composition. According to the assignment, the structures will be clearly quantified in values from 1 (best) to 0 (worst). The algorithm, which is based on the analysis of data, sources, and theories of multi-criteria decision-making, should, therefore, facilitate the design of the external wall. At the end of this article, there is a verification of the functionality of the algorithm on a case study. We believe that software that uses the proposed algorithm could be very useful for practice. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Residential and Commercial Building Envelope Systems Evaluation)
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15 pages, 964 KiB  
Article
Comparison of the Experimental Measurement Methods for Building Envelope Thermal Transmittance
by Xinrui Lu and Ali M. Memari
Buildings 2022, 12(3), 282; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12030282 - 01 Mar 2022
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 3110
Abstract
Building energy consumption and ways to reduce it have drawn increasing attention in recent decades. Thermal transmittance is not only a code-enforced parameter during the design and retrofit phase of building assemblies, but also strongly related to the accuracy of whole-building energy modeling. [...] Read more.
Building energy consumption and ways to reduce it have drawn increasing attention in recent decades. Thermal transmittance is not only a code-enforced parameter during the design and retrofit phase of building assemblies, but also strongly related to the accuracy of whole-building energy modeling. There are several existing methods to measure the building envelope thermal transmittance, and with the development of new techniques, more practical and precise measurement methods have been explored. The study discussed here focused on comparing methods to measure the building envelope thermal transmittance, both in laboratory and for in-situ measurement. Typical research studies related to the Hot Box Test Method, the Heat Flow Meter Method and the Infrared Thermography Method are described and compared. This paper provides a state-of-the-art review of the up-to-date measurement methods for building envelope thermal transmittance and provides alternatives for engineers, architects and researchers to practically measure the building envelope thermal transmittance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Residential and Commercial Building Envelope Systems Evaluation)
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17 pages, 7575 KiB  
Article
Performance Evaluation of Thermal Bridge Reduction Method for Balcony in Apartment Buildings
by Xinwen Zhang, Gun-Joo Jung and Kyu-Nam Rhee
Buildings 2022, 12(1), 63; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12010063 - 09 Jan 2022
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 2528
Abstract
Most apartment buildings in South Korea use internal insulation systems to reduce building energy demand. However, thermal bridges such as balcony slabs in apartment buildings still lead to significant heat loss in winter, because the internal insulation system is not continuous in the [...] Read more.
Most apartment buildings in South Korea use internal insulation systems to reduce building energy demand. However, thermal bridges such as balcony slabs in apartment buildings still lead to significant heat loss in winter, because the internal insulation system is not continuous in the balcony slab structure, and floor heating systems are commonly used in residential buildings. Therefore, this study investigates two types of thermal break elements, namely thermal break (TB) and thermal break-fiber glass reinforced polymer (TB-GFRP), to improve the thermal resistance of a balcony thermal bridge. To understand the effects of balcony thermal bridges with and without thermal break elements, the linear thermal transmittances of different balcony thermal bridges were analyzed using Physibel simulations. Then, the heating demand of a model apartment under varying thermal bridge conditions was evaluated using TRNSYS simulations. To understand the effect of insulation systems on heat loss through a balcony thermal bridge, apartments with internal and external insulation systems were studied. Whether the apartment was heating was also considered in the thermal transmittance analysis. Thus, the linear thermal transmittance of the thermal bridges with thermal break elements was reduced by more than 60%, and the heating energy demands were reduced by more than 8%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Residential and Commercial Building Envelope Systems Evaluation)
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30 pages, 7874 KiB  
Article
Developing FEM Procedures for Four-Sided Structural Sealant Glazing Curtain Wall Systems with Reentrant Corners
by Ali M. Memari, Nicholas Simmons and Ryan L. Solnosky
Buildings 2021, 11(12), 597; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11120597 - 29 Nov 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 6178
Abstract
In the cyclic racking evaluation of curtain wall systems, physical testing with instrumentation is the standard method for collecting performance data by most design professionals. The resulting testing of full-scale mockups can provide many types of data, including load and displacement values at [...] Read more.
In the cyclic racking evaluation of curtain wall systems, physical testing with instrumentation is the standard method for collecting performance data by most design professionals. The resulting testing of full-scale mockups can provide many types of data, including load and displacement values at different stages of loading through failure. While this type of data is valuable for product/system development/fabrication and design, such data can also provide a means for simulation validation of the curtain wall cyclic performance under simulated earthquake loading. Once the simulation study is validated using the test results, then parametric studies by designers can be conducted with greater ease, ideally with commercial software packages, without the need for testing. For the results of this research study, a practical industry formulated finite element modeling (FEM) approach was used to predict the performance of the curtain wall mockups. Here, unitized four-sided structural sealant glazing (4SSG) curtain wall system mockups that incorporate a re-entrant corner were subjected to cyclic racking displacements per the American Architectural Manufacturers Association (AAMA) 501.6 Structural Sealant protocol. System performances, including displacements, were obtained from the FEM study and used to calculate the effective shear strain of the structural silicone and the drift capacity of the system. This paper describes the details of the techniques developed for FEM, the analysis results, and shows an example application of the numerical modeling approach for mockups with racking test results available. The goal of this modeling approach was to create and test methods that practicing consulting engineers can quickly conduct in their offices on common commercially available software often available to them. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Residential and Commercial Building Envelope Systems Evaluation)
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22 pages, 4981 KiB  
Article
Derivation of Kinematic Equations Based on Full-Scale Racking Tests for Seismic Performance Evaluation of Unitized Four-Sided Structural Sealant Glazing Curtain Wall Systems
by Ali M. Memari, Nicholas Simmons and Ryan L. Solnosky
Buildings 2021, 11(12), 593; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11120593 - 28 Nov 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2992
Abstract
Curtain wall glazing systems are a major part of a building due to the multiple roles they have, including occupant protection against environmental effects and the transfer of loads to the structural system. From a structural perspective, limited analytical guidelines and methods exist [...] Read more.
Curtain wall glazing systems are a major part of a building due to the multiple roles they have, including occupant protection against environmental effects and the transfer of loads to the structural system. From a structural perspective, limited analytical guidelines and methods exist to aid designers in their determination of the curtain wall performance without extensive simulation or laboratory testing. This study takes experimental data from full-scale, “unitized”, four-sided structural sealant glazing (4SSG) curtain wall system mockups featuring a re-entrant corner subjected to cyclic racking displacements in accordance with the American Architectural Manufacturers Association AAMA 501.6 protocol to derive and establish equations that predict the relative displacements of the glass relative to the glazing frame, based on the amount of inter-story drift. Through derivation and testing, sealant cohesive failure and glass cracking were identified as limit states and corresponding drift levels were determined to control many of the equations. Displacements from the newly derived equations were correlated to the effective shear strain value experienced by the structural silicone in the mockup concurrently with the curtain wall’s drift capacity. This paper provides detailed derivation of the kinematic equations for possible use by glazing design professionals. Such equations can help designers to more easily predict the drifts that cause damage to such systems by manual calculations without the need for expensive mockup testing or time-intensive computer models. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Residential and Commercial Building Envelope Systems Evaluation)
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Review

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28 pages, 8901 KiB  
Review
Residential Building Envelope Energy Retrofit Methods, Simulation Tools, and Example Projects: A Review of the Literature
by Ehsan Kamel and Ali M. Memari
Buildings 2022, 12(7), 954; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12070954 - 05 Jul 2022
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 4253
Abstract
As one of the biggest energy consumers, buildings are the focus of the energy conservation market, and the building envelope, which has the highest impact on heating and cooling loads, is one of the main targets in retrofit projects. Several materials, systems, methods, [...] Read more.
As one of the biggest energy consumers, buildings are the focus of the energy conservation market, and the building envelope, which has the highest impact on heating and cooling loads, is one of the main targets in retrofit projects. Several materials, systems, methods, and simulation tools are used in these projects, and it is critical to understand the impact of these methods in different locations, their frequency of use, and the effectiveness of market-ready new solutions. In that context, it is necessary to review the energy conservation measures (ECMs) that are suitable for residential building envelope retrofitting, and that are commercially available or under research and development. This paper provides an overview of these ECMs. A literature review was conducted on different building envelope ECMs, including traditional and innovative energy retrofit methods, such as aerogel and phase change materials on opaque and transparent components of existing buildings. Results show that the most effective retrofit projects include bundles of ECMs, and the traditional ECMs can be as effective as more innovative solutions in terms of energy saving. Moreover, computer energy models were created for a typical residential building in the US for cold and warm climate zones to determine the impact of different retrofit approaches based on a sensitivity analysis. Results show that envelope ECMs have higher energy saving potentials in cold climate zones, of up to around 30%, and reducing the air infiltration has the highest impact in both cold and warm climate zones in a typical small residential building. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Residential and Commercial Building Envelope Systems Evaluation)
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