The Water Wall: a bio-inspired thermoregulative facade system

Modern office buildings commonly have fully glazed façades in order to reflect a luxurious appearance while maximizing the daylight penetration to the interior space. Though glass façades provide plentiful natural light, the amount of energy needed to maintain indoor thermal comfort poses a great challenge to the designers with the cost of what is called environmental services (those services devised to control the internal thermal and ventilation environment) to be respectively high. The effect of responsive building fabrics to complement, reduce and in some cases render unnecessary, mechanical and electrical environmental systems, may result in effective redeployment of a building’s construction and maintenance budget. In the same time, it can increase occupant comfort and control. The “Water Wall” is an experimental system which was designed to explore the potentials of water as a construction material to regulate the exchange of energy between a building and its environment. The concept originates from research done on the field of biomimetics and inspiration gained by the way living organisms maintain their body’s temperature within comfort limits; it is motivated by the thought that the challenge of having a constant interior environment while the temperature and the weather outside fluctuate has been tackled many times in nature and this could provide inspirational solutions to the design process. The idea of introducing variability into the fabric of a building to respond to changes, rather than relying on building services, offers tremendous advantages; it actually extends the ideas and principles already well-established in building and accords with the propositions of Darwin, who held that the capacity to survive depends on the ability to adapt to a changing environment. All in all, “Water Wall” is an easy to install modular frame system that controls the heat energy flow by the use of variable thermal mass (water) and the direct solar heat gain through an absorbing colorant diffused into the water. Although, this thesis includes detailed design and simulations to test the performance of the system, there is still space for a lot of improvement and many ideas that could be implemented to increase its value of the system, bringing it to a whole different level of performance.Architecture and The Built EnvironmentArchitectural Engineering +TechnologyBuilding Technolog