Energy efficiency of double skin façades: an approach to Brazilian climates

The heat gains and daylight transmitted through windows directly influence the building's energy demand. High performance façades, when correctly specified, produce a great potential of energy savings by using daylight efficiently and controlling heat gains and/or losses. In Brazil, the lack of natural ventilation associated with large glass areas in office buildings exhibits substandard results concerning energy efficiency. This article demonstrates an approach to highly ventilated double skin façades in Brazil, investigating the potential of natural ventilation in accordance with the local climate. Applying the Light Design and Ideal Window Area methodologies, window areas as a function of different types of high performance glass are thermally simulated in the program EnergyPlus. The simulations are run for 10 cities in Brazil, in one of those cities, Curitiba (-25° 25' 40"), the annual results of hourly simulations demonstrate the building energy demand as a function of window area, glass type, room ratio and size. The results concerning the energy efficiency perspective only illustrated that double skin façades could be applied for southern regions in Brazil and under certain criteria.