Tower Skin-Design Optimization Solution

In a world confronting environmental challenges, there is an earnest requirement for adaptive building envelopes that climatic changes are considered in the design phase. Thereby giving the best comfort and indoor environmental quality while keeping up high effectiveness is essential. Adaptive facades can provide step-change upgrades in energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy while improving the comfort of buildings for tenants.
Abu Dhabi experiences hot and humid climate and extremely sunny days with temperature and humidity reaching 49°C and 100%, respectively during summer.
Concerning thermal comfort and natural light in the Albahr Towers in Abu Dhabi, a survey that was organized by Shady Attia indicates that 20% users are not comfortable and 40% are very uncomfortable.
Therefore, in this ‘post skin design optimization’ project, the new proposed skin of Albahr Towers (designed by Saam Kaviani) is a reconfigured in terms of the shape, size and cells density. This optimization process mostly focuses on users activities during working hours of the office floor during two periods:
9 am to 5 pm on the 21st of June and 4 pm to 5 pm on the 21st of September. These dates and periods are marked as “excessive” for this floor based on a separate research and analysis done on the Al-bahr Towers’ solar radiation gain in different months of the year.
In this project Wallacei X and PedSim engines were used in order to accomplish the evolutionary algorithm solving and agent-based modelling simulation.