Evaluating dynamic building materials: The potential impact of climatically responsive building enclosures

Despite the great interest and investment in new material technologies and advanced simulation tools, predictions for the potential impact of dynamic envelope systems so far have been based on simulations of the overall building. However, overall building simulations provide limited insights into the behavior of the building envelope since results of these types of simulations are affected by many factors that are independent of or indirectly influenced by the building envelope. Therefore, it is difficult to isolate the impact of the building envelope on building energy consumption independent of building-specific factors such as building geometry, construction, environmental systems, and building use. In order to understand and quantify the dynamic nature of environmentally responsive envelope systems, designers and engineers necessitate a new method that enables the direct evaluation of only the envelope. This method needs to be able to predict the heat transfer through dynamic building envelopes under variable environmental conditions. Ultimately, this new method should help identify the applicability of new technologies early in the design process when detailed information on a building's design or operation are not yet available.; This thesis establishes a new method and a validated reference case for the evaluation of climatically responsive building envelopes with dynamic material properties. The method isolates the performance of the building envelope in a building energy simulation model through transformation of a validated BESTEST model. It allows for parametric evaluation of the thermal performance of dynamic building envelopes under a wide range of environmental boundary conditions in comparison to existing reference technologies. This method can serve as a starting point for the critical evaluation of the impact that dynamic envelope systems have on the heat balance of buildings. The method was applied to the evaluation of electrochromic glazing to demonstrate the strength of this method when utilizing building energy simulation to evaluate the behavior of dynamic building systems. With this new method, a precedent and reference case has been established that can guide the evaluation of isolated building systems utilizing advanced dynamic heat balance energy simulation tools.