Building Integrated Vegetation Systems into the New Sainsbury's Building Based on BIM

Today, there is a growing need of environment-friendly buildings, so-called 'green', facilities, and energy saving buildings to decrease environmental pollutants released into cities by construction activities. Green-Building Information Modeling (Green-BIM) is a purpose-built solution which supports to forecast energy consumption of 3-D model of a building by augmenting its primary 3-D measurements (width, height and depth) with many more dimensions (e.g. time, costs, social impacts and environmental consequences) throughout a series of sequential phases in the lifecycle of a building. The current study was carried out in order to integrate vegetation systems (particularly green roof and green wall systems) and investigate thermal performance of the new Sainsbury's building which will be built on Melton road, Leicester, United Kingdom. Within this scope, a 3-D building model of the news Sainsbury's building was first developed in $Autodesk^{(R)}$ $Revit^{(R)}$ and this model was then simulated in $Autodesk^{(R)}$ $Ecotect^{(R)}$once weather data of the construction site was obtained from $Autodesk^{(R)}$ Green Building $Studio^{(R)}$. This study primarily analyzed data from (1) solar radiation, (2) heat gains and losses, and (3) heating and cooling loads simulation to evaluate thermal performance of the building integrated with vegetation system or conventionally available envelops. The results showed that building integrated vegetation system can potentially reduce internal solar gains on the building rooftops by creating a 'bioshade'. Heat gains and losses through roofs and walls were markedly diminished by offering greater insulation on the building. Annual energy loads for heating and cooling were significantly reduced by vegetation more significantly through the green roof system in comparison to green wall system.