Design of a sustainable out-of-town office building in Morocco:
Combining the Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach for
material selection to the rooftop PV system design
Abstract
Achieving the building’s sustainability requires the assessment of its
life-cycle, involving the selection of sustainable materials during the
construction stage and adopting rooftop PV system in the exploitation
stage, with the objective to lower its carbon footprint. This paper
reports a case study for the design of a sustainable office building,
located out of town, integrating PV panels for autonomous electricity
production. For this purpose, the multi criteria decision making
analysis was carried out to select the optimum sustainable materials,
and the energetic balance of the building was evaluated. Accordingly,
the required rooftop PV panels and the associated area were then
estimated, while a storage battery was included for the building’s
continuous electrical supply. Using the Weighting Sum Method, and
considering the technical/environmental and financial constraints,
double wall in hollow brick and expanded polystyrene floor were
selected, while expanded polystyrene was used as the insulating
material. The energetic analysis of the building performances indicated
an average annual heating and air cooling requirement of 0.57 kWh/m
2 and 36.87 kWh/ m 2, respectively.
Finally, the on-roof PV panels required a nominal peak power of 400kWp
with 1218m 2 area, while a 82kAh storage battery
capacity was evaluated for a continuous electricity production.