Improving the building envelope performance through tensile material in the Iranian climates

In this paper, the energy and environmental impacts of a passive retrofit action, involving the installation, on an office building, of a second-skin system with the external layer made of a PVC-coated polyester fabric, were evaluated in terms of primary energy saving and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. The primary energy consumption and the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions associated with the considered case studies were evaluated using the software TRNSYS, across a whole year. The study was carried out considering three Iranian cities (Tabriz, Teheran and Bandar Abbas) in three different climates (cold, temperate and hot) upon varying the orientation of the two main façades of building (north-south and east-west orientation). The simulation results highlighted good results when the building is east-west oriented, up to -12.9% for the reduction of primary energy consumption (in Teheran) and up to -42.1 MgCO2,eq (in Tabriz) for the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions.