Design Procedures of Double-Skin Façades for Achieving Internal Thermal Comfort in Educational Buildings

Abstract

The educational buildings within universities are the main spaces for students' academic activities and life during the daytime, students spend 80% of their time inside these buildings. Therefore, achieving student thermal comfort requires universities to spend time and cost to prepare these buildings to be comfortable. The University of Mosul (UoM) included 24 colleges with 117 scientific departments, which contained hundreds of educational buildings occupied by 65000 students in addition to 4099 faculty staff and 3170 administrative staff. The thermal comfortability in UoM educational buildings partially achieved using the traditional method of air-conditioning units and some of the buildings still use electrical and gasoline heaters, which cost and increase the air pollution with less efficiency function. Therefore, the study is a trial to find a guideline for designing and treating the educational building using the passive and active design focusing on the facades as most elements of the building facade the outside environments and affect the internal thermal comfortability. The methodology applied simulation and analysis of a successful double-skin façade to eliminate the main steps of the design. The case study selected the following criterion of uncomfortable buildings in the UoM considering the questionnaire thermal characteristics of educational buildings. The case study is the hostel building (Al-Zahraa residential Building) within the University of Mosul. The results show three main steps that should followed by the designers in the university to achieve thermal comfortability, additionally considering the possibility of redesigning the facades.

Keywords

• Thermal comfortability, double-skin, dynamic façade, kinetic façade