By: Aayush Chaudhary, ACad Studio
Façades play an important role in regulating natural heat generated by the sun. Sustainable façades can be defined as elevation designs that promote the use of green materials and conserve energy. Sustainable façades reduce the energy consumption of buildings, ensure thermal comfort, visual effect, and acoustic, and improve air quality. It is a new approach to maintaining the integrity of the building for future generations.
Green façades or vegetative walls are designed by aiding the growth of green climbing plants upward and across the front portion of the building. The green façade impacts the overall building’s thermal performance. Designing the green façades is a nice choice but do we know about materials best suited for building green façades? Before designing the elevation, various parameters are studied to ensure the comfort of living. The various parameters are:
The temperature fluctuation – All the sides of the buildings have a different temperature range due to the absorption of solar radiation. The green façade affects the absorption rate. The green materials absorb light and heat energy which keeps the temperature low. The façade support system also makes the compressed air layer around the walls when stems are immature. This is very similar to the dry-clad approach. The effects of green buildings result in 1.4ºC cooler in summer and 3.8ºC warmer in winter.
The difference in surface temperature – The surface temperature of bare walls and vegetative walls differ during summer. In green façades cover, the green leaves provide shading and even prevent from gaining heat from the building system. This results in calculating the average bare wall temperature that comes out 5.5ºC higher. The maximum temperature is 15.2ºC higher.
The relative humidity temperate – The back part and the front area of the building have a different rates of relative humidity. The evaporation and transpiration of water droplets from leaves cause an increase in humidity and give cooling in summer. This results in 7% higher humidity in summer and 8% lower in winter.
The sustainable building façades are designed by following various steps. The approaches to designing sustainable buildings are:
Vegetation is considered a particulate sink because of the plant surface which acts as a source of turbulence which increases the turbulent diffusion and influences PM diffusion. Green walls are an appropriate tool to reduce PM via deposition without disturbing the air exchange between the street canyon and the air above it. The vegetation has helped with ambient air pollutant removal.
The Thermo-viscous boundary layer at plant surfaces reduces sound, and sound energy is effectively reduced by the interference caused by sound waves. The presence of soil-like substrate interferes with the source of information and ground-reflected contribution. This effect is known as the Acoustical Ground Effect. The different parts of the plant absorb sound at different frequency ranges as leaves produce a sound absorption effect in the high-frequency range and wooden parts like branch stem and twigs produce an effect in the mid-frequency range.
Apart from the abovementioned benefits, green façades also offer various benefits like; reducing the urban temperature, thermal benefits, improving biodiversity, attenuating rainwater, increasing productivity and creativity, improving the sense of well-being, and health benefits. To conclude, with the reduction in energy resources and increase in cost every day, the primary focus is kept on building systems to conserve energy. intelligent façades came up with a solution that provides heating and cooling and produces its energy.
Though many types of research are carried out about using of energy requirements in the building system. The energy-efficient building envelope consists of the use of optical properties of glass, double façades to control air circulation, insulating materials, etc. The concept of green building in the construction sector has reduced the waste of resources, the resource utilisation improved, improves the living standard of people, and most important the symbiotic relationship between man and nature.
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