Abstract/Summary

Airport terminals have much higher average energy consumptions than normal public buildings. This is caused by their complicated space features and operation characteristics. In China, large modern airports were built from around 2004, which means our understanding to the real energy performance of these buildings lag behind the design practice and with feedback from operation experience, both design or operation of modern airports shall be improved in terms of energy efficiency. Nanning Airport provided an excellent example for that purpose, with comprehensive operation data collected during 2016–2019. The data were firstly presented in this paper, followed by clustering and correlation analysis to establish the correlation among potential factors. From the analysis, the major factors influencing energy consumption were identified as passenger flow, meteorological parameters and supply fan frequency. Regression analysis was performed based on monthly data and equations were provided for the calculation of the terminal total energy consumption and its three sub components according to the input parameters of passenger flow data and meteorological data. These equations provide guidance on energy supply for the operation of this airport and more importantly can be used as valuable reference when designing airports in similar conditions.