Enhancing building energy efficiency by adaptive facade: A computational optimization approach

The energy consumption in buildings, which accounts for approximately one-third of the total energy used in the world, can be reduced significantly by employing adaptive facades. In this study, a computational optimization approach is proposed to enhance the energy efficiency of buildings based on the design of an adaptive facade system, which can adapt its thermal and visible transmittance for dynamically varying climatic conditions. The engine of the adaptive facade design approach is an automated optimization process, which combines the building energy simulation program (EnergyPlus) with an optimization technique through Eppy, a powerful Python toolkit. The modified firefly algorithm, an in-house optimization tool, is employed to design the adaptive facade system in this study. However, our proposed method is not tied to any particular optimization tool and does not impose any restrictions on a type of building. To this end, the capability of the proposed method for enhancing building energy efficiency is validated by two case studies, namely a typical single office room and a medium office building. We found that the proposed adaptive facade system can reduce the energy consumption by 14.9-29.0% and 14.2-22.3% for the first and second case study, respectively, compared to the static facades. These significant findings demonstrate the potential of adaptive facades to enhance the energy efficiency of buildings.