Impact of Dynamic Facades on Thermal Performance of Office Buildings

With a thoughtful insight into Arab cities and the technological evolution impacts on their contemporary architectural designs, especially in their office buildings, it is noticed that there is lack of using a clear and specific scientific methods in dealing with the thermal transfer through the skins of those buildings is clearly apparent, resulting in the intensity of the cooling system used for achieving the thermal comfort of the occupants of this vacant area, thereby increasing the energy consumption rates within these buildings. So there is a need to find a new method to enable improving the thermal performance of the office buildings in Arab cities through using the dynamic facades system, to achieve that a virtual office building subject to the open offices systems with glass facades in the hot, dry climate region of Greater Cairo was studied using the parametric design tools in order to achieve a distinguished dynamic façade, whereas it was applied to the southern side of the buildings, the consumed heating and cooling loads were studied before and after the addition of this façade by using the environmental simulation techniques, and it is found that this technology saved 43% of the energy consumed by the cooling loads, which basically contributes directly to reduce energy consumption within the office buildings. Keywords: Dynamic Facades, office buildings, Energy loads, Parametric Design, Simulation tools, Thermal Performance.