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National energy standards of countries worldwide require a wide range of measures to be used in energy policies. It has become a challenge to fulfil different measures of building envelope design optimisation through enhancement of energy conservation. To overcome this challenge, this study proposes an optimisation model for determining the optimum envelope design of a reference building in four climate regions. The optimisation model utilised a genetic algorithm, as an optimisation tool, and national standards to define the thermal insulation requirements of buildings for energy calculation. The building prototype was analysed to minimise the life-cycle cost (LCC), where building envelope elements – namely, windows, exterior walls, basement floor and ceilings – were included as energy efficiency measures. The results showed how each building element affects energy consumption in different climate regions. Exterior wall insulation was observed to have the maximum impact on the LCC of the whole building, which was followed by the window type selection. An optimally designed residential building was found to spend approximately 20–25% less energy than the limiting values expressed in the national standard. This paper highlights how the optimum design envelope for buildings in various countries and climates can be characterised by the use of the proposed optimisation model.

Trombe walls are the most widely applied passive systems that utilise solar energy for heating massive walls. Although studies have been undertaken in the fields of Trombe wall application and design, the research on the effect of the vent area and the number of vents on the performance of a Trombe wall remains limited. In this context, a parametric study investigating the effect of the vent-to-wall-area ratio on Trombe wall performance was conducted. A computational fluid dynamics model was employed for validation analysis. The results were verified by experimental measurements of temperature. At each step of the parametric study, the vent-to-wall-area ratio in the Trombe wall model was increased by 2% starting from the unvented case, and the results were simulated per ratio. In this study, temperature measurements of the glazing, thermal wall and space were employed as the evaluation criteria. The results of the parametric runs showed that a Trombe wall with eight separate air vents and an 8% vent-to-wall-area ratio provides the maximum heating performance. Furthermore, a monolithic vent configuration with an 18% vent-to-wall-area ratio performed slightly better compared with other configurations of monolithic air vents.

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