Influence of dust accumulation on building roof thermal performance and radiant heat gain in hot-dry climates

• We estimated the dust impact on residential buildings in hot-dry climates.
• A new transient solar absorptivity model was introduced.
• Hourly dust deposition was modeled to predict monthly averaged dust accumulation.
• Dust accumulation was found to have a significant impact on building energy use.

This paper presents an effort to estimate the impact of dust accumulation on exterior building roof absorptivity and total radiative heat gain. A new model is introduced to calculate a building solar absorptivity as a function of dust accumulation rate. Hourly dust deposition is modeled using the Non-hydrostatic Multi-scale Model (NMMB) to predict monthly averaged dust accumulation over time. The correlation sensitivities to its input parameters and the impact of dust accumulation on building annual loads are also studied. Results show that dust accumulation increases the roof solar absorptivity from its initial value up to dust absorptivity based on the site climatic condition and roof characteristics. The predicted monthly averaged accumulated dust for all studied sites varies between 1.3 and 73.8 g/m2/month. The new model has resulted in an annual cooling space increase of 44.7–181.1 kWh/m2/year, for the selected hot-dry sites with moderate to extreme dust storm conditions. Heating reductions were found to be 0.5–13.1 kWh/m2/year which are not significant in comparison to the increase in annual cooling load. The results of this work were attempted to improve the predictive capability of current building simulation models.