Evaluation on Cooling Energy Load with Varied Envelope Design for High-Rise Residential Buildings in Malaysia

Abstract

With the development of the economy in the recent years, Malaysia is maintaining a high economic growth and therefore, its energy consumption increases dramatically. Residential buildings are characterized by being envelope-load dominated buildings, hence are greatly influenced by the outside climatic conditions. Due to the hot humid climate of Malaysia, air conditioning system accounts for more than 45% of the total electricity used in the residential sector which is required to remove substantial amount of gained heat due to poor thermal envelope performance. This paper uses Ecotect software to analyze the impact of building envelope design on energy cooling load for residential building in Penang, Malaysia, which include area ratio of window to floor, exterior wall thermal insulation, and several kinds of shading system. This paper describes an integrated passive design approach to reduce the cooling requirement for high-rise apartments through an improved building envelope design. Comparing with the other passive strategies investigated in this paper, the results indicated that exterior wall thermal insulation is the best strategy to decrease both annual cooling energy load and peak cooling load which achieved a reduction of 10.2% and 26.3% respectively. However, the other passive strategies applied also have some marginal effect on decreasing the cooling load.