The cold spots are often hidden corners where mold can grow, rot can develop and bugs can move in without being noticed.”Curtainwalls, light shelves, a slim building design, and an east-west orientation bring daylight to 95 percent of interior spaces at Mundelein High School, Mundelein, Ill., science and classroom expansion. This strategy is most effective when the ambient diurnal temperature swing is extreme, but still traverses the comfort zone.Internal thermal mass is mass that is entirely contained within the building envelope.

By coordinating the massing of the building, location of windows and daylight harvesting with mechanical and electrical design, engineers can downsize the building systems and match the high efficiency goals of the project.And, Robbins-Elrod notes that louvers and grilles can help protect the building envelope openings from unwanted debris, while allowing air to flow in and out of the building. In any event, if the ambient diurnal temperature cycle does not traverse the temperature of the internal cycle, thermal mass will have little effect on the daily heat transfer across the building envelope and little effect on total conditioning required.Thermal mass can significantly improve thermal comfort, however, in spaces that have significant swings in air temperature. “Also, when used as roofing or as cladding for exterior walls, metal with a high SRI can help to reduce the building’s cooling loads.”Ortega adds, “Metal roofs can act as radiant barriers, which can significantly cut the amount of work that the insulation needs to do. A question must then be asked: is that kind of uniform indoor environment really … Passive architecture is the design of buildings and site planning that take advantage of local climates enabling the structure to naturally assist the building in its ability to store thermal energy from the sun and cool the structure by shielding it from the sun rays. Passive Design Techniques. “To dial the strategy in to the particular climate, we use an energy and moisture-modeling tool, WUFI Passive,” says James Ortega, who is part of the certification staff at PHIUS. And, there are now more than 1 million square feet of PHIUS+ Certified and Pre-Certified projects across 1,200 units nationwide.The PHIUS+2015 standard is being updated with PHIUS+2018, which is being phased in throughout this year and will eventually replace the original standard. “Passive design depends a lot on the way the building is orientated,” Vujovic says. “It can produce a hygrothermal model that shows how your building will perform at various times of the day and calendar year. “The engineer took the solution with the least amount of material to achieve the most optimal structural design.”And, Lee says insulated metal panels provided ease of construction, while also giving high R-values on the walls and roof.According to Robbins-Elrod, metal’s reflectivity can increase a product’s solar reflectance index (SRI) value, aiding in the reducing the cooling loads through passive design. Metal also lends itself to providing attractive exterior shading elements that can block or minimize direct solar heat gain while preserving some transparency, such as using louvers or perforated metal, for an exterior building element.“Metal building systems can be particularly effective when integrated with the building envelope to create strategically placed exterior shading,” Robbins-Elrod says. To learn more about the PHIUS+ Passive Building Standard, visit The climate in which a building is located may dictate the type of windows needed. “The systems are very quick to assemble, and they can also be disassembled easily,” she says. It accounts for the actual site, including any shade trees or billboards that may obstruct the sun.”Passive building is based on many of the same building blocks as Energy Star, LEED and the Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Home designation. “Designing a building envelope above the mere code requirement in terms of adding extra insulation is always a good passive design strategy. Passive cooling design techniques can be applied to new homes as well as renovations, across a range of different climate zones.