DYNAMIC CALCULATIONS OF THERMAL BRIDGES IN CURTAIN WALL AND ITS EFFECTS ON COOLING LOADS AND THERMAL DELAY

Thermal Bridge is a multidimensional heat flow that has been discussed among architects and engineers. Integrating thermal bridges into building energy simulation (BES) has been challenging because they are often simulated at steady-state conditions without including their dynamic behaviour, such as thermal delay or time lag. Most BES programs tend to simplify this part, so they only calculate the thermal bridge in the steady state, which may lead to miscalculation. This paper proposes a novel method to calculate dynamic thermal bridges by integrating the thermal bridge and the energy simulation part. The thermal bridge simulation is conducted under transient conditions at a certain timestep where the boundary conditions are obtained from field observations. The results are then used as input in the BES program to calculate the cooling load's end-use intensity (EUI) and thermal delay. This study enables architects not only to identify potential thermal bridges in the existing building façade but also to support material and geometrical explorations during the conceptual design stage.