The energy savings potential of using dynamic external louvers in an office building

This research is aimed at exploring the influence of external dynamic louvers on the energy consumption of an office building located in Abu Dhabi-UAE. The IES-VR software was used to predict the energy consumption of a representative office module in order to evaluate the overall energy performance of employing external louvers on the south, east and west oriented facades. The use of dynamic facades was compared to another simpler method of using light-sensor controlled light dimmers. The results show that the potential energy savings using light dimming strategy only was 24.4%, 24.45% and 25.19% for the south, east and west oriented facades, respectively. The proposed dynamic louvers system with light dimming strategy achieved energy savings of 34.02%, 28.57% and 30.31% for the south, east and west orientations, respectively. Detailed analysis of the results showed that the facade's optimal static angle was -20 degrees for the south oriented facade and 20 degrees for the east and west oriented facades. Using these fixed optimal angles resulted in slightly lower energy savings than that of the dynamic facades. This would seem to be a good tradeoff between savings in energy running cost and the investment required to install, operate and maintain a dynamic facades system. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.