Minimizing Energy Consumption of Educational Buildings by Testing Alternatives of Green Envelopes in Alexandria

A green building is a building that is ecologically responsible for using eco-friendly building materials and construction practices. By enhancing the process of design, construction, building running, maintaining, and removal, architects can preserve natural resources, contribute significantly to the decarbonization of the built environment and consequently improve quality of life. In that respect, building envelopes are not just physical separators between indoor and outdoor environments, but they have a significant impact on reducing the building’s overall energy consumption and in improving the indoor environmental quality. To make better decisions, technology can significantly assist architects in the pre-design stage or retrofit interventions to select the appropriate parameters of green buildings. In that matter, modeling and simulation tools for integrating the parameters and materials of green architecture in building envelopes are useful interfaces. Based on relevant bibliography, the research developed the parameters of green building envelopes, which were experimentally and numerically investigated one by one through a case study conducted on an educational building in Alexandria. Autodesk Revit Architecture software is used to create the building model, and energy simulation is performed using DesignBuilder to assess the indoor environmental quality and energy consumption. Hygrothermal comfort (interior air temperature and relative humidity) and greenhouse gas emission (indoor environmental quality), and cooling electricity (energy consumption) are assessed along the year to measure the difference between the performance of the building’s envelope before and after modifying the parameters of green buildings. The results show that by setting the interior air temperature at 25 °C in the simulation process, integrating parameters of green envelopes will decrease the energy consumption and CO2 emissions by 20% at June and by 19% at September.