Study of Different Curtainwall Facade Options

1.4. South-Facing Curtainwall Facade Scenarios

The impact of the five different south-facing curtainwall facade scenarios described in Table 2 on a building heating and cooling load was studied for the three cities identified in Table 1. For each scenario, the curtainwall was assumed to consist of 50% of a multi-layer glazing system as a vision section, and 50% of either spandrel panels or multi-glazing BIPV assemblies as the non-vision section. All the multi-layer glazing systems (with and without PV) were assumed to have low-e coating, 6mm glass panes, 20mm air cavities and aluminium framing with 19mm thermal break and insulating edge spacers. The vision sections characteristics were obtained with FRAMETMplus [13] using the curtainwall framing system. The U-value and SHGC were evaluated at 2.03W/m2oC and 0.39 for the double-glazed system, and 1.2 W/m2oC and 0.28 for the triple-glazed system.

Table 2. South-facing curtainwall facade scenarios.

#

Vision Section (50%)

Non-Vision Section (50%)

1

Double-glazed

Spandrel (U-value=0.55 W/m2oC)

2

Double-glazed

BIPV configuration A

3

Triple-glazed

BIPV configuration B

4

Triple-glazed

BIPV configuration C

5

Triple-glazed

Spandrel (U-value=0.55 W/m2oC)