Designing kinetic facades for fully glazed buildings: achieving daylight optimization and cooling load reductions

This paper reports a study on design process that integrating various modelling techniques to optimise a kinetic façade system design to achieve energy efficiency and quality lighting and thermal indoor environment. The aim of the study is to develop such a process that is feasible to be used in design firms for every kinetic façade design project, as such a system needs optimisation to gain its full potential the GCC region.
The proposed design process utilizes commercial software capable of producing algorithmic rapid data needed to assess useful daylight and cooling loads simultaneously. The devised algorithmic process is aided by the actual geographic location under a realistic sun-path system, in order to simulate instant variable shading configurations. The resultant Kinetic Facade was applied to an assumed base case typical fully glazed building model located in Abu Dhabi to assess the viability of the design, where 25% in cooling load reductions was achieved. The Kinetic facade was further compared to another model with Static Louvers where it outperformed the latter annually by 25% in terms of useful daylight illuminance and 6% in terms of cooling load reductions. The quantitative results of this research had proven that the proposed design process had produced accurate design data that was used to achieve daylight optimization and cooling load reductions simultaneously.