Skycourt as a ventilated buffer zone in office buildings: assessing energy performance and thermal comfort

Skycourts, recently, have been considered as beneficial spaces in commercial buildings, in particular offices. Skycourts are perceived as spaces that act as transitional and recreational nodes. Research considering the performance in response to conditions in these regions is steadily growing. However, there is a lack of conclusive results in the available literature about the actual energy performance of these spaces. The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the potential of the skycourt to perform as a buffer zone that suits to the ventilation strategy in office buildings in a temperate climate, thus could potentially reduce energy demands for heating and cooling, furthermore ensure thermal comfort in these spaces. Using a hypothetical reference office building in London, coupled Building Energy Simulation (BES) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are carried out for two ventilation modes; mode one, the base model represents skycourt with isolated mechanical ventilation and mode two, alternative models that incorporate combined ventilation strategies with the adjacent offices’ zones of the skycourt. These are simulated and evaluated regarding energy consumption and thermal comfort. Overall, the simulation results highlight that the incorporation of skycourt as buffer zone can potentially have a significant impact on the annual energy consumption