An Assessment in the Heat Gain and Loss Through Opaque Elements in Commercial Buildings in Brazil

This paper presents an analysis of the energy performance of commercial buildings in Brazil based on the influence of the thermal transmittance of the external walls and roof. Several combinations were simulated taking into account different input data such as the internal load density, window to wall ratio, solar absorptance and other parameters to evaluate their influence on the annual energy consumption. The sampling techniques are based on the application of the Latin Hipercube method to generate samples, which considers the interaction of two or more parameters for the same case. The influence of different components on the annual heating and cooling load was also investigated through the heat balance method in order to verify the feasibility of analyzing the heat gain and loss through the opaque elements. The analysis was performed using the EnergyPlus program and weather files related to three cities in Brazil (Florianópolis, Curitiba and Salvador).