PhD Project: Intelligent Glazed Facades

At present, there is a trend for an increased use of glazed facades for office buildings. This can be seen in European countries as well as Asian and American countries. Building’s energy-performance is more and more important and minimizing the ener-gy demand of the building is much more in focus. The building regulations in Den-mark are applying more and more strict regulations with regards to the maximum allowed energy demand of the building. The maximum allowed energy demand of buildings will be reduced to 75 % in 2010, 50 % in 2015 and 25 % in 2020 compared to the energy demand from the 2008 building regulations. In relation to the growing concern of energy demand and usage, there is a need for reducing the demand of primary energy sources of buildings and to apply more sustainable building strategies in the design phase of projects.

The objective of this PhD project is to develop new concepts for near future glazed facades for office buildings by integrating new promising technologies in order to fulfill the energy regulations for 2010, 2015 and 2020 as well as facades for zero energy buildings. The facade needs to be able to control irradiance, secure indoor air quality, control heat transfer and should be able to store excessive energy. Furthermore, the facade needs to include technologies for harvesting renewable energy.

The PhD project will cover the initial analysis, through the use of design tools used at present, defining the requirements of the facade, followed by full scale experiments concerning different concepts for the intelligent glazed facade. The latter will be con-ducted over two seasons where the first season is based on the initial analysis. The experiments for the second season will be based entirely on the experiences ga-thered from the first experiments, in order to optimize the performance of the facade and correct the deviations from the first season as well as correcting the simple calcu-lation methods.