Environmental design guidelines for residential NZEBs with liner tray construction

Abstract

Liner tray, steel gauge, or cassette construction is a lightweight steel frame system (LSF) especially suited for low-rise buildings, which offers celerity and quality. It is a viable option for constructing affordable residential Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs) in those areas where ‘craft-based’ house-building industries have proven unsustainable, as occurs in some countries of Southern Europe. From an environmental point of view, the continuous disposition of liner trays allows excellent adaptability to the microclimatic context and the particularities of the local site as well as the thermal homogeneity of the envelope. However, its lightweight can entail large thermal variations and overheating problems, especially in constructions with high thermal resistance. A careful design adapted to each location can help avoid these problems, but accurate energy calculations are not always feasible in detached house design. This paper studies the Proyectopía system's passive strategies, an innovative liner tray system made of extruded aluminum for sustainable, low-cost detached houses in Spain. Environmental design guidelines can be a powerful and suitable tool for addressing various house projects that share the same construction system. Several parameters with a substantial impact on the house energy demand, such as insulation thickness, window glazing type, window-to-wall ratio, solar shading, and thermal inertia, are analyzed in a house prototype. Designers can use these parametric study results to perform environmental assessments from the early stages of the design process.