Assessment of daylight performance and the impact of shading devices for typical in-patient rooms in healthcare facilities in Cyprus

Abstract

In the last few decades, more attention is given to design spaces with good daylight performance, either to provide useful daylight levels to the occupants which could eventually affect their health and wellbeing, or to reduce the artificial lighting use by using natural lighting. Natural lighting access in healthcare facilities has been correlated to improved physiological and psychological factors. Therefore, this makes it even more important to study daylight performance in typical in-patient rooms. This study focuses on the cases of the single room and the double room. Computer simulations were performed using the RadianceIES software in IES-VE. For the purposes of this research, fifteen different window-to-wall ratios were used, and shading devices were implemented to study the optimum design configurations. Moreover, the daylight analysis is based on dynamic metrics, such as the Useful Daylight Illuminance, the Spatial Daylight Autonomy and the Annual Sunlight Exposure. The findings suggest that the optimum scenario is achieved through the requirements set during the design process which take into consideration the useful daylight levels, the amount of time that the room can be autonomous only with natural light, and finally the probability of glare.