An advanced envelope retrofit option to increase solar gain and ventilation through facade for reducing energy demand of residence buildings

Researches on reducing building originated yearly energy demand are among the top issues in every country. Nowadays, lots of scientific researches were performed in Mediterranean countries like in others in order to designate different methods to improve the energy performance of the buildings. Turkey is one of the representative countries of Mediterranean climate. Additionally, Turkey follows the developments in EU and EPBD 2010/31/EU became the lead document to direct Turkish building ener­gy policy. National research projects are being done to adopt the methodology in EPBD 2010/31/EU to national conditions. As a finding of the national research project, unlike the standard residential building types, conventional façade retrofit measures doesn’t have a considerable effect on energy performance improvement of luxury residential building type. Therefore, an advanced façade retrofit method, which increases solar gain and ventilation rate through the façade depending on the requirement of the season, was suggested for these kinds of buildings in this study and the approach was summa­rized through the sample case calculations. The approach in this paper offers a different perspective on building envelope retrofits while reaching EU’s 2020 target especially to increase renewable energy portion in building construction. Therefore, a new exterior wall component detail was suggested and theoretical investigations were done on an example building to reveal if the façade detail serves for the purpose. Consequently, it was shown that the suggested wall component has big potential to reduce yearly energy demand of luxury residential buildings in comparison to the traditional retrofit actions. © 2017, Istanbul Teknik Universitesi, Faculty of Architecture. All rights reserved.