THERMAL PERFORMANCE OF PLANT-SHADED BUILDING FAÇADES IN HOT CLIMATE

The hot climate in the United Arab Emirates generates unique challenges to building engineers seeking energy efficient building designs. Design features can influence the indoor environment and reduce energy consumption, including thermal insulation, window size, and glazing types. Additionally, shading effects caused by external plantation can affect the thermal performance of the building façades. The use of intensive plantation around buildings has increased in popularity due to its contribution towards reducing the heat gain. Additionally, plant-shaded wall technique helps in lowering the heat-island effect in the urban context. Plant-shading of building façades is common technique to decrease wall surface as well as inner space temperatures through decreased heat gain due to incident radiations being blocked by the vegetation; evaporative cooling caused by the irrigation water; and heat resistance due to lower thermal conductivity of the plants acting as heat insulators. This paper investigates the potential improvements in the building performance when integrating plant-shaded design strategies into sustainable residential buildings in hot climate. The study examines the thermal performance of plant-shaded façade to reduce cooling load as a strategy of lowering energy consumption. Experimental work was carried out to analyze the impact of using plantation for solar control of residential building façades. External and internal wall surface and ambient temperatures were measured for plant-shaded and bare walls located in Al-Ain during a hot summer period. A literature review was carried out to identify typical design strategy applied to the case study; the use of vegetation and plant-shading techniques was investigated; and thermal insulation effect of plant-shaded wall was tested. The study concluded that shading effect of the intensive plantation has a substantial impact on the thermal performance of residential buildings and can reduce peak time indoor air temperature by 5 °C and reduce the peak air conditioning energy demand by 18%.