RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Impact of Cool Roofs on Energy Consumption of Office Buildings in Chongqing of China
Ya-feng Gao*, Kai Zhao, Bin Su, Zhi-qiang Wang, Xiao-min Tang
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 9
First Page: 142
Last Page: 146
Publisher ID: TOBCTJ-9-142
DOI: 10.2174/1874836801509010142
Article History:
Received Date: 10/4/2015Revision Received Date: 20/5/2015
Acceptance Date: 15/6/2015
Electronic publication date: 19/8/2015
Collection year: 2015
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Cool roofs are characterized by high solar reflectance (SR) and high infrared emittance (E). When cool roofs are exposed to solar radiation, it will have a lower surface temperature compared to a similar surface with lower SR and E values, and this would result in decreasing the heat penetration into the building. Cool roofs offer significant cooling energy saving in buildings with air conditioning. In order to quantify the influence of cool roofs on the energy consumption of office buildings in Chongqing, the authors tested the electricity consumptions of air conditioners in two rooms on the top floor of an office building. One of the rooms was with cooling roof installed. The result shows that in summer, the room with cooling roof saved electricity 0.049kWh per square meter per day. However in winter, it increased electricity consumption by 0.012kWh per square meter per day.