Author(s)

E. Alkhateeb, H. Taleb

Abstract

For years, nature has provided an abundance of blessings for mankind. Besides its obvious and direct role, the task that has been most evident is its ability of adaptation. Biomimicry has provided an inspirational foundation for many innovations. In this paper, tree bark has been chosen as the main focus of observation in order to scrutinize and analyse complex structures that contribute to the tree envelope’s efficiency. Many concepts have been extracted based on its anatomy and modifications. They have then been applied to a residential villa located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) in order to create a low energy consumption building. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the extracted techniques thoroughly and discover the function and mechanisms of its parts. New strategies will be developed to apply to the selected case study. Shading, thermal insulation and cavity walls were among the used techniques. Eventually, the building’s performance with the new strategies will be evaluated using computer simulation software and compared to the original case. The paper revealed very promising results for enhancing the building envelope’s performance with the possibility of energy consumption reduction reaching around 34%.

Keywords

biomimicry, energy efficiency, IES software, building envelope, tree bar, energy simulation