With the increasing building height and density in urban areas, it is important to optimize the design and operation parameters of buildings to achieve energy saving and promote thermal comfort, especially in tropical areas with significant cooling load. However, the thermal and lighting interactions with surrounding buildings, particularly the shading impact from surrounding buildings on both lighting and cooling loads, are often ignored for simplification. In this study, the significance of considering surrounding obstructions in building energy and indoor lighting environment simulations for tropical areas is investigated. First, the influence of design parameters and operational parameters, and inter-building effects on the annual thermal and lighting loads of commercial buildings in a high-density urban area in central Doha is analyzed. The optimal window-to-wall ratio of representative buildings are analyzed considering inter-building effect. The results indicate that while the optimal window-to-wall ratio is significantly altered by inter-building effects, the cooling set-point demonstrates a consistent and strong linear influence on cooling energy consumption, offering a substantial energy-saving potential. Furthermore, the energy demands of high-rise buildings are found to be more sensitive to window-to-wall ratio and inter-building effects. Subsequently, indoor lighting performance is evaluated through simulations. It is demonstrated that inter-building effects exert a significant impact on the indoor daylight autonomy performance of high-rise buildings. These results are considered contributory to the design of buildings in tropical urban centers. • Windows-to-wall ratio (WWR) is optimized considering inter-building effect. • Inter-building effect reduces cooling loads of high-rise buildings and medium floor low-rise buildings. • Cooling and lighting loads of low-rise building with large floor area are not sensitive to inter-building effect. • Indoor daylight autonomy of high-rise buildings is sensitive to WWR and inter-building effect.
Guo et al. (Sun,) studied this question.