Curtain wall system: equalization between environment and economy

Abstract

In the last few decades, the economic growth in Hong Kong has been remarkable, impacts on the existing environment seem to be overlooked. However, it is apparent that in recent years, increasing awareness of environmental issues resulting a growing concern of sustainable development around the world. As building is the major consumer of natural resources, different measures have been attempted to reduce the energy consumption of building. Research found that one of the important development of saving energy in commercial building is by the design of building envelope. This is due to the building envelope would determine the energy performance of building including the energy consumption of artificial lighting and HVAC system. In respect of this, with the saving of energy consumption in cooling and lighting aspects, curtain wall system has been proposed as the key to achieve sustainable development in building. Thus, the aims of this research is to investigate the sustainable performance of curtain wall system as office building envelope in related to the aspects of environment and economy. To achieve the objective of the research, eight targeted building are selected for detailed case studied on the methodology’s assessment methods. Namely, Overall Thermal Transfer Value (OTTV), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), Daylighting Aperture (DA) and Air Leakage Rating (AL). Following by the matrix comparisons and result consolidations, the best overall performance building can be determined. Also, the most economic and environmental friendly buildings can be defined. Result shows that curtain wall systems with better environmental benefits are always with higher life cycle cost. Whereas, the one with higher economic advantage would consume excessive energy and results great impact to the environment. Therefore, to equalize between environment and economy of building envelope, it requires joint efforts of various parties to investigate the innovative and cost-effective curtain wall envelope and bear in mind with the concept of sustainable development.