Dissertations for Building Services Engineering (BSE)

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Browsing Dissertations for Building Services Engineering (BSE) by Subject "climate change"

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    Double Skin Façade for an office building in the extreme UAE climate
    (The British University in Dubai (BUiD), 2021-07) ALI, NIZAM AHMED AKBAR
    Regional climate change scenarios indicate ever-increasing building energy consumption trends which are a serious cause of concern for the built environment sector of the UAE. Mitigating the increasing energy trends is very well understood by employment of active technological changes in the building services systems. This research focuses on the other side of the coin which is the passive technologies in reducing building energy consumption, more specifically technologies related to the skin of the building. A conventional passive skin technology (external shading) is fielded against unconventional passive skin technology (double skin façade - DSF) on key metrics such as annual cooling energy, annual solar gain, temperature and velocity profiles. The course of the research takes a holistic approach starting with a review of existing studies leading all the way to intermodal comparison of the dynamic thermal simulation and CFD results. Promising results are obtained for the building with external shading with 9.2% annual cooling energy savings whereas the study shows an increase of +1.42% jump in annual cooling energy consumption with the DSF building as compared to a generic high rise tower base case. Intermodel comparison reflects upon the under estimation of the dynamic thermal simulations in predicting cooling energy savings as compared to CFD simulation. An additional CFD sensitivity analysis further sheds light into the ability of the k-e turbulence models and constant effective models in determining stable solutions for CFD simulation of large unrestricted vertical volumes in DSF cavities.
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    Resilience of UAE high-rise buildings to climate change: Impacts of projected climate changes on annual energy demands.
    (The British University in Dubai (BUiD), 2020-07) Sallam, Duaa
    The impact of climate change and global warming on buildings energy consumption has been an arguable topic in many studies all around the world. However, there are limited studies on the effect of climate change on UAE buildings and its impact on energy demand. As global warming is hitting all areas in the entire world, designing and retrofitting buildings based on future weather conditions is essential to avoid early deterioration of buildings especially in countries with high air temperatures like UAE. This motivates the research on finding to most energy efficient solutions that would reduce energy consumption of UAE high-rise buildings in present and future weather conditions. To achieve this goal, future weather datasets in hourly time step for UAE were collected from three statistical tools representing stabilization and high emission scenarios. Those datasets were analyzed and compared with present weather files. This study has revealed that the derived future weather files daily dry-bulb temperatures are increasing throughout the years, while the daily relative humidity ratio and global horizontal solar radiation values are marginally decreasing from the present values. Then, energy efficient solutions were selected to test their effect on total system and cooling energy of high-rise buildings in UAE. Those solutions include increasing the insulation of external walls, improving the glazing thermal properties, and adding heat recovery units to the HVAC system. In this study, a high-rise building with 60% WWR which represents a typical UAE high-rise building was used as a base case to test the selected solutions on it. This study has shown that the energy consumption of UAE high-rise building will keep increasing in future and it can reach up to 50% more from the present consumption in period 2090 in high emission scenario. Using glazing with enhanced thermal properties would reduce more energy than applying sensible and latent heat recovery units. However, after 50 years the sensible and latent recovery units would reduce more energy than the enhanced glazing. Applying the three best options in this study was able to reduce total system and cooling energy by 20% to 21% in present and future periods.