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“Evaluation of Buildings in the Future” by Elpida Vangeloglou

536 views · Published 16 September 2015 · 11:38 · Indexed 20 October 2026

Channel: The VELUX Group · 2015 · Science & Technology

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Lecture from the 6th VELUX Daylight Symposium “Daylight as a driver of change” that took place in London on 2-3 September 2015. For more information visit http://thedaylightsite.com

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the designers view on daylight design in new and refurbished buildings. The inevitable turn of the building sector to sustainable design techniques has brought daylight analysis to the center of attention. Buildings with an enhanced daylight performance have minimized energy requirements and an improved indoor climate. However, assessing daylight conditions is somewhat adhered to old-fashioned methods, as building regulations and schemes in most countries are not updated to research findings.

Daylight Factor is the most widely used method of establishing compliance with building codes and credits within environmental assessment schemes such as BREEAM, DGNB etc. As much as this method is easy to comprehend and apply, it leaves the designer a lot of space to produce a building with uncomfortable or energy intensive daylight conditions. That is because DF takes no account of the building location, façade orientation or varying sky conditions. Moreover it provides no indication of glare or visual comfort nor is the solar shading taken into account. The latter is of increasing importance in low energy buildings since the solar shading is more often used and is vital for the expected performance of the building. Instead, the introduction of climatebased daylight calculations that rely on hourly meteorological data over the year, form much more accurate, yet simple measures of the daylight conditions in a building. That is because they make daylight assessments tailored to each building, whilst producing information on lighting energy savings, indoor illuminance conditions and occupant comfort. Climate based daylight metrics could effectively replace daylight factor in regulation and scheme requirements. So far the DA and UDI methods are applied by the UK Education Funding Agency for the evaluation of designs submitted for the Priority Schools Building Programme (PSBP). Furthermore a variation of DA, the so-called Spatial Daylight Autonomy (sDA) is used in the environmental ration system LEED v4.

An example with four shadings shows that the solution achieving the lowest daylight factor in the examined room was actually the solution with the most hours/working year of useful illuminance levels and with adequate daylight autonomy. So by accounting for the bespoke climatic annual conditions of the building as well as its location, the design decisions for improved daylight can be altered. It underlines the importance of using the right daylight criteria in the design phase and hence also update the existing regulations and schemes to Climate Based Daylight metrics.

Elpida Vangeloglou is a Sustainability Engineer at the High Performance Buildings department of Ramboll UK. Her academic background is formed of an MSc in Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Crete and an MSc in Sustainable Energy in Buildings at the Technical University of Denmark. Elpida has dedicated a significant part of the MSc dissertation she carried out as an intern at MicroShade A/S to daylight analysis and has collaboratively published an article on the subject, while her first scientific publication regarded passive design solutions.

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