ENERGY EFFICIENT BUILDING ENVELOPES IN INDIA CURRENT STATUS & CHALLENGES

　　ABSTRACT: A holistic design approach to building design making active use of ventilated concrete structural floors for the control of comfort in buildings.

　　Fulcrum Consulting have spent 20 years developing an approach to creating low energy buildings where the building structure is actively ventilated to provide both a cooling and heating source. The approach is repeatable and applicable to any building in an area with diurnal temperature variation. We have built more than twenty of these buildings, which have covered a wide variation of types.

　　This approach was first used in the UK to create a building at University of East Anglia known as the ‘Elizabeth Fry Building’ completed in 1993 to commercial costs without additional grant support which remains the lowest energy use building in the UK. It has also been independently acclaimed as the most comfortable in a database of several hundred post occupancy evaluations in a wide ranging study of building performance.‘The best building ever’

　　The paper will explain the design , report on energy performance of the Elizabeth Fry Building over the past 13 years and describe how Fulcrum have since developed this holistic design approach to repeatably create architecturally exciting and robust, reliable low energy buildings.

　　Keywords:- low energy building, energy storage , concrete , comfort, ventilation, heat recovery