Design and Thermal Analysis of a Rotating Solar Building

Abstract

In recent years, various rotating buildings such as residential buildings, restaurants and pubs have been designed and constructed. Most of these rotating buildings do not possess passive solar design features or they cannot respond passive solar design principles entirely because the primary design purpose of these rotating buildings is to make all spaces view the landscape as required.Passive solar design is the optimum utilization of architectural peculiarities of a building and appropriate material selection for improving energy efficiency of a building in heating, cooling and natural lighting. While projecting a passive solar building, different factors including building orientation, latitude of the location and climatic properties must be taken into consideration.Although passive solar buildings are superior to conventional buildings in terms of various aspects, they have some deficiencies as well. Despite insulation, largesouthfacing windows which are designed to maximize solar heat gain in winter turn out to be heat loss areas in cold winter nights. They also cause excessive solar heat gain in summer. So as to eliminate such disadvantages of passive solar buildings, direction of buildings can be changed in winter and in summer by rotating them. In this project, a rotating building.s thermal performance is investigated. For doing this, a thorough literature review is carried out. First, passive solar design tools are identified. Second, examples of rotating buildings are analysed. Then, a rotating cafe located at IZTECH Campus . IYTE Cafe - is designed on the basis of passive solar design criteria. The cafe is assumed to be rotating two times a year and performance of the building is compared with a conventional passive solar building by calculating heat gain and heat loss of each building. It is found that, substantial energy savings could be possible through a rotating building. Furthermore, energy savings in summer and in winter conditions are calculated respectively as 14 % and 23 %.