| | | FWIW...www.sciencedirect.com (journal homepage) To piggyback on FR's comments on retro...
April, 2025
Case Study conducted in Cairo, Egypt. Re: Retrofit
Research was to test both traditional and smart glass types on buildings facade...to improve indoor thermal comfort and reduce energy consumption. Best results obtained when SPD smart glass was tested...reduced total site energy by 46%. (EC, SPD, PDLC)
As Egypt is a developing country, the number of office buildings is increasing. And since most users, now a days, prefer to be surrounded with a wide-open view and natural illumination of the interior space, this is reflected on the façade design by integrating the curtain wall system into the building envelope. While curtain walls represent a potential for most people, it has various drawbacks on building energy performance, indoor thermal comfort, and users’ productivity as was explained and discussed in the literature review. This leads us to the main evolving problem which is: due to the ineffective façade design and high window to wall ratio in office buildings, heat gained from the building skin negatively affects the indoor thermal comfort and energy efficiency. Therefore, a detailed data collection, sorting and analysis was performed through the literature review chapter to reach the proposed solution which is to integrate the different smart glass types into the façade design to achieve better thermal comfort and energy performance results.
Consequently, the aim of this research is to test the different types of smart glass including electrochromic, thermochromics, photochromic, SPD, and PDCL on a selected case study of AASTMT admin building façade and recommend the glass type that achieved desirable results of energy reduction and thermal comfort improvement.
After comprehensive studying of the smart glass different types and gathering the needed specifications and numerical data of each, a simulation study was done to prove the hypothesis. AASTMT office building case study, which is in smart village, Egypt, was selected based on its location, façade type, available data, WWR, and project scale. Each type of smart glass and the base case was simulated once, and results were recorded. The following results demonstrate the highest obtained percentage decrease along with its glass type that achieved it regarding each of the total site energy, heating and cooling loads, and Unmet hours. For instance, the total site energy, cooling loads and unmet hours decreased by 14.8 %, 19.7 %, and 45.5 % respectively when placing the SPD on the facade. Moreover, the heating loads were reduced by 16 % once the thermochromic glass was used. |
|
