Evaluation of building glass performance metrics for the tropical climate

This paper provides useful information on different high performance glass façades and assesses their applicability for green building in a tropical country like Singapore. The research effort encompasses an improvement in the methodology used to predict solar irradiance through building glass that incorporates seamlessly the advanced glass models into the solar irradiance simulation. In addition, this will show how to effectively estimate the actual sky behavior via a measured data-based optimization process. A comparison of the simulation results with the measurements from an outdoor climatic test chamber under tropical climate will be performed. An assessment based on the typical glass performance metrics (e.g. U-value and Solar-Factor) together with measured energy savings obtained with the use of different high performance glass façade compared to clear float glass as a control will also be presented.