No abstract

No abstract

Daylight quality and quantity in Algerian schools show serious problems in ensuring visual comfort of students and teachers. Some problems are due to window design, which leads to excessive amount of sunlight penetration into the classrooms. The consequences are glare and heat gain. This study investigates the effective glazing pattern for classroom to achieve optimum daylight performance and visual comfort in Algerian classrooms. Field measurements of typical classrooms were carried out in a selected school in Algeria during solstice summer (under clear sky condition) and solstice winter (under overcast sky condition). The data of outdoor daylight illuminance were used to validate Integrated Environment Solution Virtual Environment (IESVE) daylight simulation. This study used three different glazing types, namely, clear, tint and reflective glass with different glazing proportions, subsequently, seven patterns of glazing window design were used for an extensive simulation exercise. The results of the investigation from the site measurements show that the work plane illuminance was found to be beyond the range of 300 lux to 500 lux, which exceeded recommended value, except for the southeast orientation with clerestory typology, which were recorded at 2.98% of daylight factor, in contrast the daylight uniformity in tested classrooms is appropriate. Furthermore, the simulation revealed that combination of 75% clear glass and 25% reflective glass with 30% wall-to-window ratio has achieved 41.41% during winter and 47.82% during summer of Useful daylight illuminance. The use of different glazing configurations shows a significant improvement on daylight distribution and the reduction of glare comparing to the reference model. However, such improvement in the quality and quantity of daylighting was inadequate which arises the need of further enhancement.

Buildings consume considerable amount of energy to maintain comfortable interior. By allowing daylight, visual comfort inside a building is possible which can enhance the occupant’s health, mood and cognitive performance. However, traditional highly transparent windows should be replaced with semitransparent type window to attain a comfortable daylight inside a building. Evaluation of visual comfort includes both daylight glare and colour comfort analysis. Building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) type windows are promising systems and can possess a range of semitransparent levels depending on the type of PV used. In this work, the semitransparent Perovskite BIPV windows was investigated by employing daylight glare analysis for an office building located in Riyadh, KSA and three wavelength dependent transmission spectra for colour comfort analysis. The results showed that the transmissions range between 50–70% was optimum for the comfortable daylight for south facing vertical pane BPV-windows. However, excellent colour comfort was attained for the transmission range of 90% which provided glare issues. Colour comfort for 20% transparent Perovskite was compared with contemporary other type of PV which clearly indicated that wavelength dependent transmittance is stronger over single value transmittance.

No abstract