Evaluating daylighting effectiveness of a traditional house in tropical climate

Abstract

Sustainable Day lighting is crucial for enhancing visual comfort indoors, which helps to reduce energy consumption on artificial lighting and so improves the psychological well-being of the residents. Various research on sustainable daylighting have been undertaken, but little emphasis has been placed on vernacular architecture, which is the outcome of hundreds of years of optimisation in creating a comfortable shelter utilising accessible materials and established construction techniques. This climate responsive design is being lost to universal architecture in emerging countries such as India owing to modernity. Therefore, this paper tries to evaluate the performance of sustainable day lighting techniques of four different typologies of roofs of traditional houses in Tamil Nadu, India. The study qualitatively and quantitatively examines the climate, geographical location and evaluates the total number of door and window openings and calculates the Window to wall ratio, uniformity ratio, threshold values and average daylight factor. The Quantitative evaluation has been carried out using simulation (DESIGN BUILDER) and experimental method (Illuminance meter) for all the four typologies. The study found that the Wind catcher houses, courtyard houses and clear storey houses achieved visual comfort than the Tiled roof houses. However, Clerestory house achieves the needed threshold value and average daylight factor with uniform spread of daylighting thereby achieving visual comfort without glare. Thus, this study will help us to identify the best typology in terms of achieving visual comfort and the final recommendations will be used by the architects to create sustainable day lighting strategies in modern buildings using solutions from vernacular houses which is usually a deserted area of research.