The thermal performance of office buildings’ envelopes: the role of window to wall ratio and thermal mass in Mediterranean and Oceanic climates

Tertiary sector buildings and office buildings in particular, are significant energy consumers and to that end can attain significant improvement in their energy efficiency. In order to achieve this rethinking of the building design process is needed leading to an optimization of the building’s energy demand in order to establish good indoor environmental quality conditions. The right decisions have to be taken from the early stages of design in order to achieve the best possible energy performance of the building, which makes the rational design even more vital. The main objective of this paper is to present the results of the research on the parameters that mostly influence the building envelope’s energy performance for Mediterranean and Oceanic climatic conditions, according to the Koppen climate classification. The study investigates how two factors -thermal mass and window to wall ratio - influence the building’s energy performance. A parametric study on those variables is carried out by means of dynamic simulation in order to evaluate their influence for Thessaloniki, Greece, and Nicosia, Cyprus, which feature a Mediterranean climate and also London, United Kingdom, and Munich, Germany, which feature an Oceanic climate. The results are discussed in order to draw conclusions on the influence of each parameter.

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