Adaptive Façades Strategy: An architect-friendly computational approach based on co-simulation and white-box models for the early design stage

Adaptive facades (AFs) are technologies with great potential to reduce energy consumption by changing their properties to adapt to variable climatic conditions. This paper proposes an architect-friendly computational approach for the exploration of strategies for the selection of the thermal parameters of AFs based on cosimulation and white-box models in the early design stage. In the case study, the proposed approach is applied to obtain strategies with variable U-values and variable SHGC&zv values for high-rise office buildings in seven cities. The energy consumption analysis of five scenarios is carried out to investigate the energy-saving potential of the AFs and to propose design strategies for transparent facades, and the accuracy of the approach is verified. It is concluded that the highest match of the variable U-value strategy with the optimal hourly U-values is 85.3%, while that between the variable SHGC&zv strategy and the optimal hourly SHGC&zv values is only 71.0%. Regarding the energy-saving potential, the highest energy-saving rate is 6.6% for the variable U-value strategy. However, for the variable SHGC&zv strategy, the highest energy-saving rate is greater than 10.8% in seven cities. The difference between the energy-saving rates of the proposed strategy and the optimal hourly strategy is less than 0.4%, and it is 0.8% for the AFs with variable U-values and variable SHGC&zv values, respectively. This architect-friendly approach represents a widely used design strategy for AFs that can directly provide recommended thermal parameters based on climatic conditions, and is an effective way to demonstrate the potential application of AFs in the early design stage.