Integrating Environmentally Responsive Elements in Buildings (ENERBUILD)

The energy requirement for heating, air conditioning and ventilation of buildings in industrial countries represent more than 30% of the entire primary energy demand. Therefore beside the sectors transport and agriculture the building sector is a main contributor to the greenhouse emission CO₂. These facts as well as the set goals in the Kyoto agreement show the importance of identifying sustainable solutions in the building sector to reduce emissions considerably, which arise from the operation of buildings during long- to middle-term.

The use of building elements, which are dynamically responsive to external and internal influences, and their consistent integration within integrated building concepts represent a promising opportunity to run buildings both with increased comfort and significant CO2 reductions. For a better understanding of these technologies and concepts and to obtain increased planning accuracy, the International Energy Agency (IEA) initiated within the Implementing Agreement “Energy Conservation in Buildings and Community Systems (ECBCS)” the project “Annex 44 – Integrating Environmentally Responsive Elements in Buildings ” with more than 30 research institutions from 13 countries i.e. Austria, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and USA participating.

To achieve the mentioned objectives, following tasks were carried out:

• Summary of realized projects with sustainable building concepts and elements within the participating countries
• Detailed analyses of the five building elements “facade systems, thermal storage mass, ground coupled systems, phase change materials and dynamic insulation”
• Detailed analyses of simulation tools for the design process
• Detailed analyses of building concepts in different climatic zones
• Production of guidelines regarding “Responsive building elements”, “Integrated building concepts” and “Design guide”

The analysis of the different technologies has shown that the implementation rate is still relatively low, even though the five building elements are not totally new innovations. One of the main reasons is, that the theoretical potential of energy saving and increasing comfort can often not be achieved in the practical implementation. The studies carried out within the project have shown that the reason for the discrepancy between planning and operation can often be found in a lack of appropriate planning tools and expert knowledge.

Therefore the project provides for planners, experts and researchers documents regarding “Responsive building elements” and “Integrated building concepts” with the operating principles, methods of analysis and evaluation, recommendations for planning approaches and tools, and realized projects with monitoring results and a strength / weakness analysis. The documents are available on www.aee-intec.at or www.energytech.at.

The large number of project partners from different climatic zones with cultural differences has shown that, although the ideal building concept does not exist, the planning strategies and the trends for promising technologies are already very close in the R&D area. However, to increase the implementation rate of sustainable concepts, a lot of convincing and also supply of user-friendly tools for the every-day planning process and in particular for quick estimations in the design phase, would be necessary.