A Case Study on the Impact of Building Envelope on Energy Efficiency in High-Rise Residential Buildings

The building envelope, the most important element in the energy consumption of a building, gains more importance due to the large amount of the surface area of building’s facade in high-rise buildings. The energy consumption of these buildings is increasing depending on their high transparency ratio as a result of decrease in the thermal resistance of the facade. The aim of this study is to show the importance of building envelope design in energy efficiency of high-rise residential buildings and to analyze the effect of the building envelope design on energy consumption. Turkey’s highest residential building from 2010 to 2017 was selected for the case building. DesignBuilder program with the EnergyPlus simulation engine was used for energy analysis of the building. The energy consumption results were compared with the other study data in the literature. As a consequence of the simulation conducted according to the existing facade of the building, 25% of the energy is used for heating and 14% for cooling in total energy consumption. It has been found that the building envelope designed with double-layered air corridor can offer the maximum level of residential comfort to the occupants. This study shows that the building facade with air corridor also reduces energy consumption by 30% compared to the same sized buildings.