2019 - Daylight Symposium
"Designing with daylight" by Paula Esquivias
Speakers
Paula M. Esquivias
Architect and PhD student
Lecture from the 7th VELUX Daylight Symposium “Healthy & climate-friendly architecture– from knowledge to practice” that took place in Berlin on 3-4 May 2017. For more information visit http://thedaylightsite.com
“Designing with daylight” by Paula Esquivias, David Moreno, Jaime Navarro. There are numerous parameters which affect daylight capture in buildings, determining their daylight potential. These parameters range from those which define the external conditions of the building, such as climate or surrounding, to devices for solar protection, passing through the configuration and materiality of openings. The new daylight metrics, which consider the direct and diffuse components of daylight and are linked to the daylight availability of the location of the building, determined by the climatic conditions, are based on the cumulative analysis of the hourly daylight illuminances profile in each point of study of the space.
While they have the ability to give for each point the percentage of time in which certain illuminance requirements are achieved, showing the results as a false colour map keeping the spatial information, they are not able to tell if those illuminances are got by all sensor points simultaneously. The temporal information is comprised by the cumulative analysis. Considering the minimum and maximum thresholds of illuminance in a space to develop the majority of the visual task, it means 300 and 3000 lux, by means of a temporal analysis of the hourly daylight illuminances profile of every point of study is possible to provide information about the percentage of those points which achieves, in the same time, daylight illuminances ranged between those thresholds, showing a temporal map.
While the spatial information is missed, but can be given by a complementary false colour map of the metric UDI300- 3000, the temporal analysis can be used to show the daylighting potential of a space. The resulting new metric, based on a temporal analysis, is named “simultaneous Useful Daylight Illuminances” (sUDI). In order to know the impact of the main parameters influencing the daylighting potential of a space, a comparative analysis of fourteen different parameters has been planned. For each parameter a set of variations has been simulated, obtaining for each variation the percentage of points of study, percentage of the workplane, that achieve a daylight illuminance between 300 and 3000 lux for each diurnal hour of a year. Finally, the daylighting potential for each model has been analysed and the impact of each model over this new climate based daylight metric has been also studied. After analysing the impact factor of each parameter over sUDI300-3000, is possible to draw a route map, especially for early building design, in order to give some indications about which parameters require more attention and also their prioritisation during building design in order to get a well and balanced daylighting.
Paula M. Esquivias is an architect and PhD student focusing her research into climate-based daylighting and thermal analysis in order to provide a better understanding of the effect of the sun radiation into our buildings for getting a balance between visual and thermal comfort. She acts as a consultant to architects on daylighting, energy performance and energy labelling. She has also been lecturer in energy labelling, sustainable energy resources in buildings, lighting and daylighting.
