daylighting

Throughout history, natural ventilation has remained the preferred choice for the majority of residential buildings, while, in commercial buildings, natural ventilation went from being the single option to somewhat of a lost art as mechanical ventilation systems and air conditioning became the standard during the second half of the twentieth century. Recently, as a result of environmental concerns, in particular the greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, interest in natural ventilation in commercial buildings has seen a resurgence.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of multiple external shading devices and identifies the most effective fixed external shading configurations for commercial building types in hot climates. Daylight contribution is also analysed in detail in order to monitor the daylighting factor reduction including uniformity for each shading configuration. Existing dynamic thermal modeling software is used to completing analysis on a theoretical open office plan building.

Daylighting is still the most energy efficient lighting strategy, but filtering sunlight might conflict with maximization of solar gains in winter or reducing solar heat gain in summer. In passive solar homes occupants ideally balance visual and thermal comfort. This study explores the relationship of daylight and thermal comfort in a passive solar home using an extended case study method.

Velux Daylight Visualizer 2 is a software tool dedicated to daylighting design and analysis. It is intended to simulate daylight transport in buildings and to aid professionals by predicting and documenting daylight levels and appearance of a space prior to realization of the building design. The critical question is whether Velux Daylight Visualizer 2 produces trustable simulations the user can be confident in. A key point to answer this question is to assess the software capability to simulate the light transport in a physically correct way.

The study is placed within the context of local building regulations in India. Building regulations, for fenestration in general and window openings in particular, are, to a large extent, ambiguous in nature. In the context of India, observations show that the regulations specify window size for the sole purpose of ventilation whereas windows are major roleplayers in the thermal and daylighting performance of buildings.

This paper provides an overview of Daylight1-2-3, a new daylighting/energy analysis software for design professionals and architectural students with an interest in daylighting and sustainable design, but no required previous knowledge of either daylighting concepts or simulations. The initial version of Daylight 1-2-3 focuses on private offices, open-plan offices, and classrooms.

This paper presents a set of solutions to enable  differential time scales for dynamic boundary conditions within whole-building energy simulation, specifically occupant behavioral adaptations in response to short-term changes in solar and daylighting conditions. The concept is to allow specialized libraries to determine in tandem the state of critical variables, such as window blinds and lighting systems, at higher frequencies than the building domain time step (e.g.

Energy savings by integrating the daylighting availability in the electric lighting management contributes to the realization of ‘Green Building’. This paper provides a simulation and calculation of office building in North China with RADIANCE software on the basis of theoretical analysis, which focuses on the influence of Window-to-Wall Ratio (WWR), sill height, glazing transmittance and window shape on Lighting Savings (LS). The study finds out the relationship between those window parameters and LS. The results may be reference for  designers as daylighting is involved.

The daylight coefficient method has been introduced in computer simulation as an efficient approach to compute indoor daylight illuminances through building static fenestration systems. A set of coefficients are calculated only once prior to simulation start for a given number of elemental patches making up to sky vault and ground.

The amount of sunlight and daylight through the façade is a key factor in new façade design. Designing a new façade, based on the idea that a façade should be able to function and perform mostly autonomously (i.e.