Investigations into impacts of fenestration and shading variation on ventilation and energy performance of an office in cooling and heating seasons

Consideration of reducing energy consumption and improving occupant comfort are crucial in sustainable building designs and retrofitting. In the built environment, fenestration and shading device (F&SD) installations are common strategies applied in buildings to minimize solar heat gains towards reducing cooling and overall energy. The influence of F&SD strategies on building performance is contingent upon their designs; however, existing research does not provide performance trends and distributions of F&SD with different configurations. This study investigated the influence of varied F&SD configurations on the ventilation and energy performance of an office unit in a building in Shanghai using brute-force parametric analysis and Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis. The evaluated strategies included window-facing orientation, window-to-wall ratio, shading device types, number of shadings, shading device depths, and shading tilt angles. The results show that changes in F&SD configurations resulted in reductions in solar gains, winter natural ventilation loss, and summer natural ventilation gains by up to 93.8 %, 80.2 %, and 75.6 %, respectively. For all F&SD configurations investigated, the difference between the maximum and minimum zone temperatures for summer was 1.39 °C and for winter, 1.21 °C. Heating energy demands increased up to 0.75 %; besides, cooling energy reductions were 3.03 % and 2.7 % for horizontal and vertical shading devices respectively. This study’s findings can aid building designers in comprehending the energy and ventilation performance of varied F&SD configurations and provide insights and references for sustainable design processes.