Low-carbon progressive design for sustainable development of buildings

With the advance of urbanization, energy consumption of public buildings is increasing rapidly, and it is urgent to achieve sustainable development of buildings. For public buildings, its energy-efficient envelope design is of great importance and necessity, which has been widely adopted to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions without sacrificing indoor thermal comfort. In this study, a progressive design approach of building envelope is proposed for energy-saving and low carbon emission. Then, the proposed method was applied in an archive building in Nanjing, China, with multiple rounds of design modifications of building envelopes through numerical simulations of building performance. The indoor temperature fluctuation, building energy consumption and CO2 emission were evaluated. Compared to the initial design, the optimized design can save 20.00%, 25.66% and 20.97% of building energy consumption in summer, winter and the entire year, respectively. Furthermore, the optimized design can reduce 20% and 25% of carbon emission in summer and winter, respectively. The progressive design method for building envelopes can significantly save energy consumption and reduce carbon emissions. In addition, it provides a reference for future green building design and application, which promotes the sustainable development of green and low-carbon buildings.