Investigations for the Thermal Influence of Glass Patterns on the Building Envelope

Indoor thermal distribution is strongly influenced by the transmission of solar energy. In summer, specifically, the solar energy intensity attains the maximum, which introduces a great heat load to enter indoors and drastically increases the temperature that often raises high enough to against the requisition of thermal comfort. Attempting to attenuate the transmitted radiant energy, this paper considers different types of patterns distributed throughout the surface of window glass and evaluates their thermal performances by comparing with that for the flat glass. The modeling results provided by the commercial CFD package, ANSYS Fluent, indicates that the indoor thermal intensity can be reduced as the solar radiation passes through the glass patterns. Under identical ambient conditions and glass characteristics, the glass having the described trapezoidal–shaped patterns is able to dissipate the indoor heat flux from 146 W/m² to 134 W/m². The glass pattern in triangular shape gives better capacity on the thermal dissipation. Based on the triangular-shaped glass pattern, the thermal field approaching to the roof window obtains 1.3°C lower than that for flat glass. Besides the pattern shape varies the transmitted solar load, the spacing between patterns can also be a parameter to change the solar effect on the thermal distribution of a building. According to the modeling results, more thermal reduction can be acquired as the pattern spacing is smaller.It is very crucial today to develop skills to reduce the power consumptions in any occasions. For buildings, there many works have done the studies based on the ventilation and glazing systems. In here, this paper provides investigations for the glass patterns on the reduction of thermal load in a building and demonstrates the transmitted solar load indeed can be attenuated if the glass incorporates with patterns over the surface.