Development of overall thermal transfer value equation for commercial buildings in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The heat gain through a building envelope contributes significantly to the total heat gain or cooling load for buildings. Buildings in the KSA consume more than 72% of electric energy produced. Most of this consumption is used by mechanical cooling and electric heating to provide thermal comfort. Studies show that the energy use in the future buildings in the KSA could be reduced by as mush as 20% compared to the existing available designs if proper code is implemented. Many efforts are currently under way to develop the first national Saudi Building Code. The overall thermal transfer value (OTTV) is used as a measure of average heat gain across the building envelope of air-conditioned buildings. The OTTV is considered as a thermal performance index for building envelopes and has been used as mandatory requirements in standard for building envelope design.;The overall objective of this study is to contribute to the ongoing efforts for developing a building code in the KSA by developing overall thermal transfer value (OTTV) equations for building envelope in the hot and humid climate of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia represented by Dhahran. In order to achieve the objective, the thermal performance of the envelope of a generic commercial building (hotel) was investigated using VisualDOE 4.0 simulation program. The overall thermal transfer value (OTTV) equations for the cooling season that runs through the months of April to October have been developed. Five overall thermal transfer value equations have been developed for each month, one for each orientation and the fifth equation for the whole building. These equations can be used by building code to control the heat gain through the building envelope.