Abstract

One of the possible ways to provide heating to the building is to use thermally activated building systems. This type of heating, besides providing significant increase in building energy efficiency, allows using low-temperature heating sources. In this paper, special attention is given to opaque part of the building façade with integrated thermally activated building systems. Due to fact that this type of system strongly depends on temperature of this construction-thermal element and type and thickness of other materials of the façade, influence of these parameters on energy efficiency was analyzed in this paper. Since the simplest and most promising way of using geothermal energy is to use it directly, for our analysis this source of energy was selected. Building energy needs for heating were obtained for real residential multi-family building in Serbia by using EnergyPlus software. The building with all necessary input for simulation was modeled in Google SketchUp with aid of Open Studio Plug-in. Obtained results were compared with measured heating energy consumption. The results show that thermally activated building systems represent good way to increase building energy efficiency and that applying certain temperatures within this element, low-energy house standard can be achieved.