Energy Efficient Glass: A Way to Reduce Energy Consumption in Office Buildings in Amman (October 2018)

This paper deals with energy efficient glass in office buildings in Amman city. The objectives of this paper are to understand the role of efficient glass in reducing lighting, heating, and cooling demands and the amount savings to achieve. In addition to suggest main guidelines to follow when designing glazed office buildings for architects and stakeholders, the evaluation of thermal and daylighting performances for a glazed building in Amman was performed by Ecotect and some equations. The reductions in lighting, heating, and cooling loads and energy cost were evaluated through a comparative simulation among three glass types considering four optical and thermal variables: U-value, visual light transmission (VLT), solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC), and solar coefficient (SC). Results show that the basic factors to enhance buildings energy behavior are: building location and the availability of solar radiation at the selected location. In addition to the building orientation and glass optical and thermal properties, the energy efficiency of buildings increases when the building orientation is between 125° and 235°, and the installed glass has U-value less than 1.5 Wm2/k, VLT between 20% and 50% and SHGC and SC less than 0.2. The implementation of these properties reduced the building electricity cost for lighting, heating, and cooling by 45%-53%.