Development of the thermal performance index for office building envelope in Asian hot-humid climate zones considering global warming

The Taiwan-EEWH green building certification system is dedicated for the hot-humid climate region and had launched the overseas version. However, when promoting to other countries, especially ASEAN countries, there are two problems inherent in the evaluation of building envelope performance should be solved. Firstly, take office buildings as an example, the ENVLOAD in Taiwan and the OTTV in some ASEAN countries are developed on the basis of the local climate that the formulas cannot be directly applied to other countries (Evaluation Manual for Green Building in Taiwan.2015 TAIWAN-EEWH-BC, 2015; Ingvaldsen, 1978; Ministry of Energy, Telecommunications and Posts, 1989). Secondly, some of these formulas were established based on the weather data before 2000; however, due to the trend of climate change becomes dramatic recently, it is essential to adjust the formulas through the predicted future weather data. In order to eliminate the problem that resulted from the climate parameters inherent in the ENVLOAD or OTTV formulas, this paper standardize the impact of climate conditions on the transmitted cooling load through building envelops by the performance-rating-based approach. In addition, a new index of envelope thermal performance, named PR is developed for commercial building in hot-humid climate region in Asia as well. Instead of ENVLOAD, using PR as the performance index of building envelope in the Taiwan-EEWH can not only contributing to the promotion of EEWH-OS, but assist architects in adjusting the design of the building envelope to better deal with climate change.