The sunslice project : the energy performance and its application to different climates

Introduction This thesis is the result of a useful experience as a member of Team Polito (the team of Polytechnic school of Turin) that is participating at the international competition Solar Decathlon Europe 2014 presenting the project Sunslice. Solar Decathlon is an international competition that challenges collegiate teams from all over the world to design and build a solar house that is energy independent. The aim of Solar Decathlon is to improve and spread the culture of sustainable energy and make people aware of the importance of a good green building plan. Our society is unsustainable because of energy consumption and emissions. The “sprawl” model had also shown its disadvantages in terms of use of soil, private mobility and decreasing of social relationship. The solution to improve this lifestyle could be found both in a smart building plan and in a smart user’s behaviour. Sunslice wants to take the people back to a more dense city, combining the advantages of autonomous housing with the advantages of urban density. Sunslice is an innovative idea of house: not a space for dwelling, the place of living. Sunslice: creates an urban community with the aggregation of individual units in an urban grid, raising awareness of the coexistence and sharing of spaces, services and energy. It creates an eco-friendly complex that first, is based on a vertical concept of space, allowing a greater supply of air, light, ventilation, and comfort. Second, creates an intelligent energy network through self sustenance of the individual units and the exchange within the urban grid, starting from solar energy as the primary source. Third, is versatile materializing the ability to customize the facade and interior spaces. In this thesis I would like to enlighten the studies done on the part of the lighting its projecting phases and its energy consume, also the energy consume for heating, cooling and domosteic hot water in order to make the annual energetic balance. There will be three different studies with respect to the location Turin, Versailles and Damascus. Versailles model the slice will be built divided in two parts of 7 m each part according to the rules of Solar Decathlon 2014 instead of one tall building of 14 m, and in this thesis the i will use the model of Versailles . I choose these three locations because are the basics for this competition, basically because the competition takes place in Versailles and the rules of the competition that the city we live in has to be involved. And after creating everything we will take the project to Versailles to compete there. My third choice is Damascus which I choose for several reasons; the first reason because of the war happening in Syria because they need new houses after the war has taken down most of the houses there. Because the project is something you can assembly and disassembly easily and move it from place to place because it's a “dry construction”, so we can use in after using it for the competition to build it in Syria after the war has stopped. This could be like an emergency construction, which also are low on cost and no energy for building, which in this case is an advantage. We have in the competition ten days to build it in Versailles to then compete with it. The second reason would be that the energy consumption that depends on the climate data, I had an interest seeing how the energy consumption would change for the project building it in the middle east and where my origin is from because usually I always have Italy and the middle east to compare with and see things from different perspectives because it's not always the same here and there. This helps me to think further and gives me ideas for building and changing and gives me energy to do my duties.