Designerly approach to skylight configuration based on daylight performance; toward a novel optimization process

• Published in: Energy and buildings 2023-05, Vol.286, p.112970, Article 112970
• Main Authors: Shirzadnia, Zahra, Goharian, Ali, Mahdavinejad, Mohammadjavad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adaptive reuse; compu-lyzer architecture; Daylight simulation performance; Daylighting performance; Industrial heritage buildings; Multi-objective optimization; Visual comfort
• ISSN: 0378-7788
• DOI: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2023.112970

Adaptive reuse in heritage buildings is the best strategy rather than demolishing and reconstructing, while the suggested retrofitting has severe constraints to preserve originality. Since several disabled industrial heritage sites are exposed to destruction while their preservation is not as crucial as other heritage buildings. In addition, reusing the industrial building to fulfill new requirements needs special consideration. Daylight performance is one of the significant needs to provide visual comfort for users. The problem of these cases regarding the indoor light level is below the standard for office work, such as discomfort glare. The main goal is to provide new daylight performance without discomfort glare instead of artificial light sources in industrial heritage buildings to reuse for office work since improving daylight performance helps to influence occupants’ well-being. The case study of the research is considered the old boiler building in Textile Factory No. 1, a historical factory in Mazandaran, Iran. The building and the skylight are parametrically modeled with grasshopper and Rhinoceros. Daylight performance is simulated in the Honeybee and Ladybug plugins based on Radiance. The selected skylight design parameters are genetically optimized by the octopus plugin using objectives such as DA’500 and DA’max2000 and evaluated by sDA and sGA that show which zone meets the daylight requirement without discomfort glare. The novelty of the method is a new design approach to optimization by integrating manual and SPEA-2 optimization algorithms. The outcomes offer a comprehensive design guide for improving daylight in the adaptive reuse of heritage building projects in a Humid subtropical climate to meet the original roof design with minimum intervention and provide daylight requirement by determining zonal space according to that performance. Finally, the efficiency of the recommended model has been improved by a 63.43% reduction of DA compared to the base case.