Comparative summer thermal performance analysis between open ventilated facade and modular living wall

Abstract

In recent years, passive solutions for building envelopes have become much more common due to their capacity to decrease the heat flux through the envelope during summer time. Vertical greenery systems (VGS) are emerging as an interesting method of decreasing the thermal demand of cities, and also improving the quality of urban life. Open ventilated facades (OVF) have gained popularity due to their capacity to enhance the thermal resistance of the building envelope. As part of a project carried out in a Paslink cell in Vitoria-Gasteiz, an experimental campaign with full-scale VGS and OVF was carried out during the summer season to assess the thermal performance of a modular living wall (MLW) with respect to an OVF. The objective is to demonstrate that a stochastic differential equations (SDE) model can be used to assess the cooling requirements of an MLW and an OVF. An analysis was carried out to evaluate how different characteristics of the main facade affect performance, such as thermal resistance, solar absorption coefficient and convection coefficient. The results of these experiments show that both MLW (46 %) and OVF (67 %) configurations significantly minimize solar heat loads compared to non-passive bare wall (BW) facades, which are the reference configurations.

Keywords

• Open ventilated facade
• Modular living wall
• Passive cooling
• Energy performance
• PASLINK test cell