Modern curtain wall design tends towards sustainability nowadays

Nowadays, modern curtain wall design has been widely used in various applications and has even made great achievement in the modern building construction industry. With the further advancement of technology, modern curtain wall construction tends towards a long-term sustainability in applications.

In most cases, curtain wall facade systems mostly consist of glass, so sunlight enters the building. The radiation from the sun in the form of light passes into the glazing facade building and heats up the walls, plants, floors, etc. And the unused energy is in the form of infrared radiation, which cannot travel through the glass and gets trapped in the building, and eventually, the temperature rises high. Meanwhile, when the glazing system can just allow enough light to light up the building and unused light is reflected back or blocked then the facade becomes more sustainable. Today smart glasses which are able to adjust opacity are invented which may revolutionize tomorrow’s facade glazing units as even very cold countries fear high temperatures during summers. Besides, high-performance glazing can contribute to optimizing energy efficiency and enhancing light penetration, which has low U- value, low shading coefficient, and has high visual light transmittance.

With regard to thermal performance of curtain wall systems, when the curtain wall facades are insulated, that could control a large amount of heat loss through convection and conduction. So far, most of the efficient facades with glazing uses double glazed units or more where gas is filled between each glass which serves this purpose and also gives an improved acoustic performance. For curtain walls used in heat and cold dominant regions, thermal breaks have a great role to insulate a building facade. The outer envelope can be composite materials of aluminum, glass fiber, or cement boards. This can drastically increase the thermal efficiency and acoustics of sustainable buildings in a long run.

In recent years, solar panel glazing facades are used in suitable locations to convert the impact radiation to electricity and use electric lights to light up the building and to air-condition the building. For glass curtain walls, the tinting and metallic coatings are processed on glazing in order to get better performance in applications. As a result, the light is allowed to travel from inside of the building to outside. Meanwhile, light is partially or completely restricted from sun or light source traveling outside of the facade to inside. In addition, choosing the right glass materials is also very important, which generally depends on building orientation analysis, sun path analysis, site shadow analysis, solar exposure analysis, and daylight analysis.