ABSTRACT
Increasingly compact high-density urban development in cities has allowed urban heat island effect to take root and increase the energy consumption of commercial buildings to cool its interior. Although the extensive use of glass facade has allowed these buildings to harness daylight to light up the building interior, it has also allowed substantial solar energy to enter and heat up the building. This is especially critical in hot and humid tropical regions, where reducing solar heat gain, while minimising heat loss are equally important. This chapter provides useful information on different high-performance glass facades and assesses their applicability for green building in tropical countries. The research effort encompasses an improvement in the methodology used to predict solar irradiance through building glass that incorporates seamlessly the advanced glass models into the solar irradiance simulation. In addition, this will show how to effectively estimate the actual sky behaviour via a measured data-based optimisation process. A comparison of the simulation results with the measurements from an outdoor climatic test chamber under tropical climate will be performed. An assessment based on the typical glass performance metrics (e.g., U-value and Solar-Factor) together with measured energy savings obtained with the use of different high-performance glass facade compared to clear float glass as a control will also be presented.
