Assessment of green roof benefits on buildings’ energy-saving by cooling outdoor spaces in different urban densities in arid cities

Amir Aboelata

Energy, 2021, vol. 219, issue C

Abstract: Over the last twenty years, Cairo experienced a great rise in temperature by 4–5 K due to the high urban density and lack of vegetation. These factors led to increased air conditioning and electricity usage. This study therefore seeks to evaluate the effect of green roofs on reducing outdoor air temperature and lowering buildings’ cooling energy demand in different urban densities. Group A consisted of the same aspect ratio areas H/W = 1 and different building heights of 12 m, 18 m, and 30 m. Group B contained areas of the same building heights (12 m) and different aspect ratios of H/W = 1, 2, and 3. ENVI-met v.4.4.4 was used to study each area by simulating the reference case and two scenarios: extensive and intensive green roofs. Then, a DesignBuilder model was used to calculate the buildings’ energy demand. This study found that intensive green roofs achieve the maximum reduction in air temperature and buildings’ cooling energy. However, the economic aspect favors using extensive green roofs as they were able to reduce air temperature and buildings’ cooling energy in Group A by 0.1–0.5 K and 1.3–3.2% and in Group B by 0.1–1.7 K and 3.2–13.3%.

Keywords: Building simulation; ENVI-met; Extensive green roofs; Intensive green roof; Urban density; PET (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544220326219
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:219:y:2021:i:c:s0360544220326219

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2020.119514

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().