Combined use of dynamic building simulation and metamodeling to optimize glass facades for thermal comfort

The primary objective of buildings must be to provide a comfortable environment for people. Recently, glass facades have gained popularity due to their aesthetic appearance. However, Low performance facades often allow substantial heat exchange between the indoor and outdoor environment that increases building energy consumption and rapid change in indoor thermal environment near the glass façade. Thus, adequate design of building envelope, namely glass facades, is essential to ensure a trade-off between several aspects, such as aesthetic appearance of the building, occupants’ thermal and visual comfort and energy consumption. The main purpose of this study is to quantify the interactions and optimize building design, particularly glass facades, for thermal comfort based on the combined use of numerical simulations, Design of Experiments (DoE) technique and an optimization method. The proposed approach is applied to a real case study, characterized by two glass facades, after subjectively assessing thermal comfort using survey questionnaire. For the analysis, a previously developed and validated dynamic simulation model is used. The combined use of numerical simulations and DoE aims to determine the critical parameters affecting thermal comfort, and to develop meta-modeling relationships between design factors and response variables. The developed meta-models are then used to determine a set of optimal solutions by performing a simultaneous optimization of building design based on the desirability function approach. The results indicate that the optimized design improve thermal comfort conditions as well as energy-savings. Finally, the results show the added value of the proposed methodology towards enhanced thermal comfort conditions.