Sustainable Building: To Achieve Thermal Comfort in Highly Glazed Buildings Using Smart Glass

The conventional building design provides static solutions for the building envelope, although climatic characteristics are variable parameters, which leads to a discrepancy between building and environment, and hence an uncomfortable thermal environment for occupants. Accordingly, the external facades of many conventional buildings have become a thermal burden on their occupants, necessitating mechanical solutions to achieve thermal comfort, which negatively affects the environment and causes energy crisis, air pollution, and global warming.

It is hypothesized that the usage of smart glass in the building envelope can provide optimum solutions to adapt buildings to the variable climatic and environmental characteristics, thus enhancing the users' thermal comfort and, moreover, contributing to achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which seek to improve health, tackle climate change, and responsible energy consumption. This is approved by simulating a high-glazed office building using DesignBuilder software in its base case and after applying the proposed smart glass techniques. Then cooling loads are calculated to investigate energy consumption efficiency.