Space Planning and Energy Efficiency in Laboratory Buildings: The Role of Spatial, Activity and Temporal Diversity

This work investigated the degrees to which energy use in laboratory buildings may be influenced by interior space planning and/or the ways space is used. The potential influences of typical open, mixed and closed plan layouts and their space utilisation densities/intensities were investigated on a good-practice base case using the TAS, Lightscape and Excel software packages. The peak winter results indicated variations (potential savings) generally within a range of 40% (i.e., +20% of the respective base cases loads) except for the effect of open vs closed plans, which resulted in a variation of 73%. The summer load variations are within 50% across the open, mixed and closed layouts, and 84% across different closed plan layouts. These results indicate that the different ways in which users, activities and systems are organised against space-to-space environmental diversity are significant determinants of the energy performance of laboratories and perhaps other building types.