| Building enclosure plays an essential role with regard to the overall performance of buildings. Specifically, energy performance, thermal comfort, and lighting conditions are significantly affected by the quality of enclosure design and its operational status. Currently, few tools exist that provide integrative and effective support for building enclosure design. Moreover, computational support for the real-time control of dynamic building enclosure components is de facto non-existent.; To address these shortcomings, this thesis introduces a novel computational environment for performance-based integrated building enclosure design and operation support. The key concepts and features of this system include: (1) Virtual enclosure—Given a set of desirable conditions for an indoor climate (preferred thermal and visual settings) and outdoor conditions (temperature, humidity, solar radiation, etc.), a set of dynamic transfer functions may be derived that constitute, in toto, the virtual enclosure. This is, thus, actual building layers. (2) Dynamic optimization—Three optimization methods are adapted and dynamically applied to derive the basic (static) values of the transfer functions of the enclosure for a given set of indoor climate requirements. Such transfer functions are arrived at for both opaque and transparent building components. (3) Construction mapping—The basic (static) components of the building enclosure are determined by the attributes of the optimal virtual enclosure being mapped to a database of actual building enclosure constructions. (4) Using a knowledge—based mapping method, the passive signature of the performance of the static enclosure is used to derive recommendations for secondary enclosure devices for shading and light redirection. (5) The actual operation of the dynamic components of the building enclosure makes use of the time-step utilization of the dynamic optimization approach.; The functionality of the system and its user interface are demonstrated via several illustrative case studies. |
