Solar energy density as a benchmark to improve daylight availability and energy performance in buildings: A single metric for a single-objective optimization

Abstract

Different simulation engines are currently required to perform daylight and energy evaluations of complex fenestration systems: Radiance has been validated to evaluate complex geometries but EnergyPlus cannot deal with them, making infeasible the thermal evaluations. The Shading Coefficient method adds an extra step to overcome that limitation: it runs irradiance simulations to create shading schedules that are shared between the simulation engines. This work supports the premise that Solar Energy Density (SED) can be used as a benchmark to evaluate the dual performance of perforated screens (PS). Therefore, only irradiance calculations will be required in evaluations – instead of running three different simulations. Orthogonal Arrays and Principal Component Analysis were the statistical techniques used to select the PS sample and weight the simulation results. The resultant SED thresholds concurrently fostered the accomplishment of daylighting and energy goals, at five different orientations: they maximised the daylit area and minimised the overlit area and total energy use. This work also presents an application example of the single-metric approach to test its effectiveness to perform single-objective optimization of PS design by using Evolutionary Algorithms. The SED approach has the advantage of reducing considerably the simulation time needed to perform the parametric optimization of PS.