A study on the energy sustainability of the kinetic building envelopes

Recently, kinetic building envelope has been an emerging technology as an innovative way to control exterior building environment, but products from many researches about the facade could not been reached to the industrialization so far. That is because its initial installation, operation and maintenance costs are still too high to use for the practical field, although buildings using kinetic envelopes could decrease their energy consumption significantly. This narrow point of view needs to be reconsidered, since buildings require great amount of energy to run their functions through the whole life and using better building components can lead to achieve much more benefits in aspects of the Lifecycle Cost (LCC). This study aims to suggest a standard type of the kinetic envelope as a prototype and to reveal its energy efficiency by a series of building performance simulations.