Investigation of the Effect of Green Double Skin Facades on Energy Consumption of High-rise Buildings in Tehran's Climatic Conditions

In the warm season, the performance of double skin facades has a significant dependence on the façade design details and climatic conditions. On the other hand, using the double skin facades can increase the building cooling load. In order to eliminate this problem, two different approaches have attracted the intrest of engineers: solar energy storage and preventing the solar radiation from entering the building by using shading devices. Therefore, in the recent years, the idea of using double skin facades with plants has been proposed in order to decrease the summer energy consumption of buildings. In this study, a thermal performance analysis has been performed by considering a high-rise building with the plants double skin façade in Tehran climatic conditions. The results indicate that although using the ordinary double skin façades can decrease the building’s energy consumption up to 24.3% in cold months of the year; it can lead to increase the summer cooling load about 18.3%. However, by using double skin façades with the plants, the building’s energy consumption in cold and warm seasons may decrease about 21.4% and 22.5%, respectively.