Evaluation of Different Roof Types Concerning Daylight in Industrial Buildings during the Initial Design Phase: Methodology and Case Study

Theodora Mavridou,Lambros Doulos

doi:10.3390/buildings9070170

Theodora Mavridou, Lambros Doulos

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings9070170

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Abstract

Used properly, daylight can provide visual comfort, reduce energy consumption and improve health and safety at work. This paper investigates the influence that different roof types, (i.e., sawtooth roof, skylight and monitor), have on daylight levels, along with the construction cost in an industrial environment in Athens, Greece. Construction costs and daylight adequacy/uniformity are antagonistic phenomena, since as the distance between the roof openings increases, the construction cost is minimised, while the daylight levels and the uniformity are reduced. Therefore, an optimisation method is proposed in order to find the optimum distance between the roof openings. The selected building is a representative unit of Greek industrial facilities, while the optimisation method is based upon a multiparametric approach. This consists of three (3) different roof opening arrangement types with different geometric characteristics. The daylight metrics used are the Daylight Area, the Daylight Factor, the Mean Daylight Autonomy, the Uniform Daylight Index and the Annual Sunlight Exposure. Overall, sawtooth roofs represent the best choice for daylight provision in industrial buildings at the examined geographic location. Using the aforementioned optimisation method, the optimum solution of distances between the roof openings ranges from 10 m to 13 m.

Highlights

Green building notions [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] and energy autonomy are becoming increasingly important in the last decades, especially in the industrial sector, where energy costs from machinery in the past used to overshadow other aspects of energy consumption
Sawtooth roof openings provided lower values ranging from 56–74% for North (N) orientation openings, 73–85% for South (S) orientation openings and 65–79% for Eastern (E) and West (W) orientation
The results indicate the significant contribution of the roof opening type in the overall ability of daylight to act as a complementary or exclusive workbench light source in an industrial building

Summary

Introduction

Green building notions [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] and energy autonomy are becoming increasingly important in the last decades, especially in the industrial sector, where energy costs from machinery in the past used to overshadow other aspects of energy consumption. As progressively traditional approaches of manufacturing have yielded to leaner methods of production and management systems, there has been an increased pressure on architecture to focus and address other aspects of energy “waste”. There is an increased demand for solutions that can be applied in the form of retrofits to existing building structures as well. This signifies the need for an in-depth study of the interrelation between architectural characteristics and daylight [12,13,14,15]. While the selections of the luminaires [16,17,18] and the corresponding lighting control [19,20,21,22,23,24,25] are crucial for the calculation of energy consumption, the building form and the corresponding impact of the daylight [26,27]

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