Energy Modelling of Multi-Family Residential High-rise Buildings in the South-eastern Mediterranean Climate: Retrofit Policy Design

Passive design strategies can reduce heating and cooling demands with integration of more efficient building systems as well as the potential to integrate modular off-site construction technology and its technical systems to offset overall energy consumption. This paper presents an analysis of the development of modular building design elements to improve thermal performance of a base-case high rise residential development before different retrofitting scenarios are undertaken to optimise the building’s energy performance and the occupants’ thermal comfort in the coastline city of Famagusta, Cyprus. This study adopts a quantitative research design primarily using multi-objective optimisation and the energy simulation of a base-case prototype building in both extreme seasons (summer and winter). The selected representative high-rise residential development is modelled using Integrated Environmental Solutions’ Virtual Environment (IES-VE) software where extensive dynamic thermal simulations have been produced to assess existing energy performance and energy effectiveness of retrofitting strategies. The representative apartment units were modelled using dominant representative energy profiles, and in all cases the preliminary results demonstrated that the physical properties of the building led to high levels of discomfort as well as higher than average heating and cooling loads. The results demonstrated that in the non-retrofitted case, the cooling and heating comprised the biggest part (67%) of the total energy consumption, helping with the second phase of the study, which is investigation of effective district scale retrofitting scenarios in the decision-making process to uptake delivery of policy implications with taking into account households’ real occupancy profiles in the South-eastern Mediterranean climate.

The work presented is the outcome of the novel methodological workflow developed to assess building performance evaluation of multi-family high rise residential buildings which has shown similar research design approach of the PhD thesis entitled 'Assessing the Domestic Energy Use and Thermal Comfort of Occupants in a Post-War Social Housing Development Estate in Famagusta, Northern Cyprus'. The thesis is conceptualised by the co-author of the paper while developing the methodology for this conference paper in collaboration with the lead-author.