Green roofs and green facades for energy savings in buildings

Abstract

Green roofs and green facades are new sustainable constructionsystems, within the green building conception, which provides severaladvantages compared to traditional ones, such as the building energydemand decrease, the rainfall water recovery, the increment of biomassand support to biodiversity in cities, etc. With the aim to improve theperformance and the design of these constructive systems a long termresearch is being conducted since 2009, both at lab and at pilot plant scaleunder Mediterranean Continental Climate conditions at the University inLleida, Spain.Regarding green roofs, first results show that a simple 9 cmextensive green roof, without insulation, can offer similar thermalproperties than a conventional insulated flat roof (3 cm insulation layer).Moreover, it was found that the use of replacement recycled rubber asdrainage material in extensive green roofs allows obtaining a moresustainable solution without losses on the thermal and hydraulicproperties.On the other hand, regarding vertical greenery systems, a greatpotential as passive tool for energy savings for buildings, specially due tothe shadow effect, raising comparable values to the obtained shadowfactor by using artificial barriers (cantilever, awnings, slats, etc.), andpromising energy savings for buildings. © 2015 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.