<p>Building energy issues have been gaining many attentions as they are one of the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emission generators. According to the current research trends, there are many passive and active ways to reduce building energy consumption and thus GHG emissions from buildings in an effective manner. Advanced passive control technologies are attracting a great deal of attention by architects and engineers as a way of enabling both high indoor environmental quality and energy efficient buildings, as well as GHG reductions. Slat blinds can be utilized to improve thermal energy efficiency and indoor visual comforts of buildings by reducing significant direct sunlight and solar heat gains through windows. This comparative study investigates building energy variations of commercial and residential building types when interior and exterior slat blinds are applied to exterior windows as shading devices in U.S. climate locations. To investigate thermal and daylighting effects of those blinds, evaluation of whole building annual energy usages is carried out using the validated slat blind model. For simulation modeling, a widely-accepted whole building energy modeling program, EnergyPlus, is used to develop a building energy model with interior and exterior blinds and validate it by measured data obtained from an actual test facility located in Daejeon, South Korea. Changes in surface colors (i.e., black and white) and slat angles (e.g., vertical and horizontal) of slat blinds are also considered for the validation process to see if those characteristics can affect thermal and daylighting performance in buildings. After a proper validation, the slat blind model of EnergyPlus is applied to medium office and mid-rise apartment prototype building models, developed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). For this comparative analysis, 16 different locations are used to evaluate the thermal and daylighting performance variations in the U.S. climates. In addition, to maximize energy savings potential of using slat blinds, daylighting aspects of blinds and lights controls are evaluated using the energy management system (EMS) developed in EnergyPlus. Results from this comparative study indicate that the case of exterior blinds tends to reduce total energy consumption of commercial buildings in most climate conditions due to high reductions of the cooling energy. However, for residential buildings, it varies depending on climate conditions because the exterior blinds can block amount of solar radiation before it enters into an indoor space, and thus it has higher potentials for heating energy usages for certain periods. Furthermore, it should be noted that it must to be considering for lighting load, slat reflectance/angles, DGI(daylight glare index), window properties, etc. for the installation of optimized slat blinds.</p>

Comparative Investigation on Commercial and Residential Building Energy Performance of Interior and Exterior Slat Blinds in u.s. Climates

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.