Designing energy efficient commercial buildings—A systems framework
Highlights
► Existing approaches for Integrated Project Design are abstract in nature. ► The paper proposes a systems theory based procedural Integrated Energy Efficient Building Design Process (IEBDP) that integrates energy efficiency, occupant comfort and life-cycle costs in the building design. ► The IEBDP framework was used to design a building in New Delhi, India. ► This design was compared to designs submitted by practicing architects and was found to be more energy efficient and sustainable, validating the usefulness of the framework.
Introduction
Environmental concerns, be they climate change, ozone depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity or environmental pollution are key challenges that the world is confronting today. A gradual increase in the world's population as well as steady growth across many of the world's economies has also led to demands to increase our built environment stock. In light of the growing concerns about our environment, it is imperative to pay attention to how we build infrastructure, residences, commercial complexes and industrial facilities. Sustainability of the built environment must go hand in hand with sustaining the natural environment.
The Architecture-Engineering-Construction (AEC) industry, both through construction practices and the operation of buildings has been one of the chief contributors towards erosion of the natural environment. Estimates of resource use vary. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that a standard wood-frame house uses one acre of forest and produces 3–7 tonnes of waste during construction [3]. Lippiatt [18] states that buildings consume 40% of the gravel, stone and sand, 25% of the timber, 40% of the energy and 16% of the water used globally per year. In India, where the context of this paper is set, buildings annually consume more than 20% of the electricity used [17].
The growth in energy prices, shortage of resources and growing consumer demands has given a thrust to sustainability in building design. Modern designers are required to meet their environmental responsibilities because of public environmental awareness, new environmental legislations, and stringent code requirements. These impacts have served to promote sustainable development, the ultimate goal of which is ecosystem preservation.
However, conventional design processes followed by most design firms are often linear in approach and lack the vision to foresee the integrated environmental, economic and social impacts of decisions. In the conventional design process, the architect gives the building a form and then passes this form on to successive service consultants (structural, electrical, mechanical and so on), who in turn take the existing architectural and design decisions as constraints for generating design alternatives specific to their specialization. Such a process of increasingly constrained design decision-making provides lesser flexibility for downstream consultants to add value to the building design from a sustainability perspective. As a result, the final design might be sub-optimal because of poor design integration. For instance, fixing the location and orientation of the building early on in the design process without adequate analysis of the heating and cooling loads on the building, might reduce the number of options for optimizing the performance of the building's mechanical and electrical systems.
This conventional design process can be improved by incorporating more iterative loops and participant integration. Design integration in sustainable building design can be conceptualized as an amalgamation of the overall design process (facilitating the information flow across and within inter-disciplinary domains) and the co-ordination among the various stakeholders and consultants based on their domain expertise.
In order to come up with an optimized design for sustainable buildings, designers should first understand the different systems participating in the design in terms of their constitution and impacts. Fig. 1 shows four major systems which designers have to be acquainted with for performing comprehensive, sustainable building design. These systems can be labeled as the macro location context, the micro site context, the building design, and the human body. These systems interact between themselves and consequently affect building design. For instance the comfort condition inside a building (building design) depends on the outdoor conditions surrounding the building (macro site context). These systems are defined by their influencing factors shown in the upper half of the diagram. The mechanisms shown in the bottom half of the diagram can then be used to design these systems and control the influencing parameters. State-of-the-art predictive models, methods and applicable standards support the comprehensive assessment of the impacts of these influencing parameters. As indicated in Fig. 1, the increase in commitment for sustainability is defined by how effectively designers can respond and integrate these four systems in the design process.
Abundant literature is available on integrated design processes for sustainable design and construction (e.g. [4], [19], [5], [14], [33]), applicable predictive models and methods for building design [13], [23], [11], [1], [24], [22] and state-of-the art tools used for analysis [27], [12], [24], [25].
On the one hand, a majority of this literature considers only limited inter-disciplinary trade-offs and lacks potency in terms of its comprehensiveness for optimized decision-making. For instance Braune [4] discusses the use of integrated practices to ensure constructability and sustainability of the end product. However, she uses only Life-Cycle-Costs and Life-Cycle-Analysis to evaluate trade-offs between various design alternatives, ignoring other parameters relating to occupant comfort, energy optimization and so on.
On the other hand, literature that approaches integrated design in a more comprehensive manner is often not prescriptive in its approach. For instance, the Integrated Design Process (IDP) proposed by the Canadian Demonstration Process is a broader framework, which conceptualises co-ordination and iterations within the design process [19], [14], [33]. The philosophy of the IDP is to meet the requirements of indoor air quality, thermal comfort, illuminations level and quality and noise control through the use of effective HVAC systems, solar and other renewable technologies. Although IDP provides a sequential approach for building design analysis, it does not allow for optimizing building performance. Furthermore, being an abstract framework, it is relatively difficult to implement.
In order to address these gaps, we propose a new framework. The scope of this framework is limited to energy efficient building design and is titled the ‘Integrated Energy-Efficient Building Design Process’ (IEBDP). This proposed comprehensive design process is intended to systematically guide the designers through various stages of design and can help in the selection of energy efficient alternatives specific to the project's needs. This framework attempts to integrate various design domains along with state-of-the-art analysis tools and predictive models and methods. In the next section, the components and workings of the framework are described. Following this, the paper demonstrates the applicability of IEBDP by using the framework to design a 250 m2 office building, taken as a case study, in the composite climate of New Delhi, India. Finally, the benefits of this framework vis-a-vis traditional energy efficient design approaches are evaluated by comparing the design done through the IEBDP process with designs submitted by a group of practicing architects.
Section snippets
Developing the IEBDP framework using systems theory
The first task in the development of an integrated design framework is the identification of the various design components. The components identified then need to be integrated together in a systematic and synergistic manner for facilitating optimal and informed decision-making. Systems engineering offers one potential approach for achieving such a integration.
‘Systems engineering’ or ‘Systems theory’ is an analysis method that places emphasis on system performance as compared to focusing on
Applying the IEBDP framework for building design
An exploratory energy efficient design for an office building was carried out to demonstrate the applicability of the IEBDP process. The objective was to design 250 m2 of office space in a 50 m × 50 m site in New Delhi, India. The space was to be designed to accommodate 30 occupants and was to provide service spaces such as a pantry (25–30 m2), storage (25–30 m2) and toilet facilities (50–60 m2). For the purpose of energy analysis the office space was considered to be occupied from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
IEBDP framework validation
The proposed IEBDP framework was validated by asking a group of 31 architects with moderate work experience to propose an energy efficient design for the same prototype office design exercise described above. The architects were requested to suggest design strategies for the same nine categories: orientation, site topography and landform, site vegetation, site water bodies, open space and activity zoning, building plan form, building fenestration design, building wall design and building roof
Conclusions
Our results indicate that the IEBDP process can aid designers in developing optimal energy efficient designs. The IEBDP process is not meant to be a universal panacea. Nor is it the only methodology by which integrated design for sustainable buildings can be undertaken. Integrated design is a critical element of sustainable design and construction. However, as remarked earlier in this paper, frameworks for integrated design are relatively abstract. With IEBDP we hope to introduce an operable
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