Nanocoating: An Energy Efficient Solution Towards Reducing Buildings Electrical Consumption In The State Of Kuwait

Abstract

Energy consumption evaluation was performed on buildings, owned by Kuwait's ministry of public housing, before and after modifying the thermo-optical properties of the existing glazing. The investigated building for this study is located in the State of Kuwait and was selected to highlight the effect of glaze coating on the overall energy efficiency using the country geographical conditions. A simulation software, called DesignBuilder, was used to construct and model the selected building and estimate its electricity consumption after applying different types of glazing modifications. This includes employing commercial coatings and films on the original building double-glaze glass in the form of a single layer nanocoating, multi-layer nanocoating, nanoceramic film, and 30% tented film. Furthermore, the parameters of the original and modified glazes, such as Solar heat gain coefficient, light transmission, and solar transmission value, were obtained experimentally then used in DesignBuilder to simulate the building annual energy consumption. The results indicated that, the original building designed had an annual consumption of about 62.2 MWh, while the multi-layer nanocoating case showed a total consumption of 56.3 MWh. Comparing the two cases, the overall energy saving achieved by the multi-layer nanocoating scenario was roughly 9.5%. The present study confirms that using nanocoatings can be beneficial toward reducing building overall energy consumption, and thus can be considered as an economical solution for the State of Kuwait.