Towards a Sustainable Mosque Building-Assessment Study Based on Dubai Climate

Mosque buildings consume large amounts of energy due to their generally large sizes and number of worshippers. Hence, it is critical to adopt the appropriate energy-saving approaches to lower the energy consumption in such buildings. This work is an assessment simulation study for six energy-saving strategies for mosque building design. These strategies include: building air tightness and infiltration, solar water heaters, wall construction and insulation, windows glazing, windows shading, and scheduled air conditioning operation. The buildings' energy modeling was done using Carrier Hourly Analysis Program (HAP). The results show that maximum power savings were achieved by the scheduled air-conditioning operation strategy, which was able to reduce the building's annual load consumption by 19.4%, followed by the air tightness strategy which was able to reduce the total building's annual load by 5.8 %. The windows shading and windows glazing strategies were able to reduce the total annual building load by 2.6 % and 0.7 % respectively. The wall insulation strategy enhanced the power saving by 1.45% and the solar heater strategy was able to achieve a power consumption reduction of 1.25%. The total annual power consumption due to all six strategies was found to be almost 30% of the baseline model.