Abstract

Heavy mass materials used in building structures and architecture can ignificantly affect building energy performance and occupant comfort. The urpose of this study was to investigate if thermal mass can improve the internal nvironment of a building, resulting in lower energy requirements from the echanical systems. The study was focused on passive building energy erformance and compared annual space heating and cooling energy equirements for an office building in Belgrade with several different pplications of thermal mass. A three-dimensional building model was generated o represent a typical office building. Building shape, orientation, glazing to wall atio, envelope insulation thickness, and indoor design conditions were held onstant while location and thickness of building mass (concrete) was varied etween cases in a series of energy simulations. The results were compared and iscussed in terms of the building space heating and cooling energy and demand ffected by thermal mass. The simulation results indicated that with addition of hermal mass to the building envelope and structure: 100% of all simulated cases xperienced reduced annual space heating energy requirements, 67% of all imulated cases experienced reduced annual space cooling energy requirements, 3% of all simulated cases experienced reduced peak space heating demand and 0% of all simulated cases experienced reduced peak space cooling demand. The tudy demonstrated that there exists a potential for reducing space heating and ooling energy requirements with heavy mass construction in the analyzed limate region (Belgrade, Serbia).