Intelligent Facades in Low-Energy Buildings.

Growing interest in development of innovative solutions for enhancement of sustainability in the built environments has been observed in recent years. According to the main constituents of buildings particularly in building envelopes, facades are expected to play a significant role towards the promotion of sustainable design in low energy buildings. This study presents a holistic review towards the analysis of ‘intelligent facades’ according to their types, current implementations, challenges, and ultimate impacts. Intelligent facades need to be responsive and conscious to the local climate, outdoor environment, and indoor spaces with view to parameters such as energy performance, thermal comfort, indoor air quality, visual comfort, etc. The findings demonstrate that energy modeling and simulations should be performed during the early stage of design process of buildings to ensure the practicality and effectiveness of any green implementations in buildings. In conclusion, the study recommends the intelligent facades to become an inherent constituent of green buildings for future development of low energy buildings.

The Concept of Zero Energy Intelligent Buildings (ZEIB): A Review of Sustainable Development for Future Cities.

It is noticed that intelligent buildings are aimed to consider social, environmental and economic values beside a substantial focus to the automated technological attributes. Due to many promising green building initiatives, the accelerated level of interests towards the applications of information technology and advanced control techniques in architecture design has been observed. With a viewpoint to the sustainable development of future cities, attributing the eventual impacts of climate change, various interrelated green building design approaches have been implemented. This study aims to elucidate the significant advancements of intelligent building design as a key constituent of eco-city development for creating greener and effective built environments. Current effort in this study is also geared toward considerable and practical implementations that were carried out in order to create buildings with zero energy consumption. Emphasis is placed upon reviewing the recent theories, attempts, implementations, and challenges towards the development of zero energy intelligent buildings (ZEIB). The findings inferred from the theoretical analysis confirm that the significant contribution of ZEIB concept will end up for the sustainable development of future eco-cities.