Abstract
Daylight is dynamic, thus there is no one common solution for all scenarios. It is more critical in tropical climate where the sky is predominantly intermediate; with inconsistent clouds formations which will influence the presence of direct sunlight and daylight availability. In this study, the potential of dynamic internal shading devices for improving daylighting performances in tropical climate was investigated. Scaled physical models and computer simulation methods were employed to examine daylighting performances of various internal shading devices under different tropical sky conditions: Intermediate sky with direct sunlight, Intermediate sky without direct sunlight and Overcast sky. The findings proved that the shading devices yielded significant different performances under various sky conditions. The effective daylighting depth under tropical sky can be as deep as 3.8 times height of the window from work plane. Dynamic internal shading device was suggested for effective daylighting in the tropics.
Highlights
Daylighting has been proven as an effective strategy to provide energy saving as well as visual comfort for the users
There is no one common solution for all scenarios. It is more critical in tropical climate where the sky is predominantly intermediate; with inconsistent clouds formations which will influence the presence of direct sunlight and daylight availability
The findings proved that the shading devices yielded significant different performances under various sky conditions
Summary
Daylighting has been proven as an effective strategy to provide energy saving as well as visual comfort for the users. Previous research concluded that the abundance of tropical daylight has not been utilized to the maximum since it is usually concurrent with intense solar heat gain (Lim, 2013; Lim et al, 2013). Daylight and solar control for energy saving and visual comfort in tropical climate needs to be further investigated. The results showed 70-90% of the sky was intermediate using cloud cover ratio; 100% of the sky was predominantly intermediate for the whole year using NI method. All of the previous research concluded that tropical sky is predominantly intermediate, which has inconsistent clouds formations that influence the presence of Direct Sunlight (DSL) and daylight availability. Thereby dynamic daylight and solar control is an important approach to optimise tropical daylighting
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