Abstract
As a passive design strategy, solar envelopes play a significant role in determining building mass based on desirable sun access during a predefined period. Nowadays, advancements in the area of computational tools permit designers to develop new methods for establishing solar envelopes. However, current approaches lack an understanding of the existing environment's site characteristics, especially when dealing with geometrical information about the surrounding context. Consequently, this aspect affects the contextual analysis process during the generation of solar envelopes because of insufficient information for the relevant input of simulation modelling. With the support of geometric and radiometric properties stored in point cloud data, such as position (XYZ), colour (RGB), and reflection intensity (I), this study has proposed novel subtractive solar envelopes that specifically consider the surface properties of the existing environment. Through a subtractive mechanism, the proposed method caters to several computational frameworks such as dataset pre-processing that aims to correct erroneous measurement during scanning. In alignment with that, the proposed building's visible sun vectors, optimal normal values, and 3D polyhedra are generated for the hit-or-miss analysis of subtractive solar envelopes. Furthermore, environmental assessments consisting of insolation and glare analysis are performed on the solar envelopes' final geometry. These performance assessments aim to investigate the potential and impact of the generated solar envelopes as it pertains to the existing buildings. Ultimately, this study supports architects not only in producing a new generation of subtractive solar envelopes based on real contextual settings but also in comprehensively understanding the microclimate condition of design context.
Highlights
Interrelations between new buildings and existing context play a significant role in achieving appropriate solar access in the built envi ronment [1]
With the support of geometric and radiometric properties stored in point cloud data, such as position (XYZ), colour (RGB), and reflection intensity (I), this study has proposed novel subtractive solar envelopes that consider the surface properties of the existing environment
This study has primarily focused on the development of the computational workflow of subtractive solar envelopes based on attri bute information from point cloud data
Summary
Interrelations between new buildings and existing context play a significant role in achieving appropriate solar access in the built envi ronment [1]. The use of centroid points on surrounding windows during ray tracing analysis primarily counts on a sample of surrounding windows, which is limited to representing the area of neighbouring facades These issues may affect environmental performance calculations during solar enve lope simulation, especially in relation to solar radiation analysis be tween planned and existing buildings. This work focused on generating and subtracting a proposed buildings’ 3D matrix based on a sunlight hours analysis that came from surrounding buildings’ windows This idea has stimulated the further exploration of methods for establishing computational solar envelopes based on point cloud data. This paper will present a comprehensive approach for establishing new solar envelopes by making use of geometric and radiometric information contained in point cloud data with an inte grated environmental performance analysis based on glare and solar radiation.
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