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Procedia Engineering 00 (2017) 000–000
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Procedia Engineering 205 (2017) 1027–1033

10th International Symposium on Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning, ISHVAC2017, 19-
22 October 2017, Jinan, China

How to choose a better envelope design? A balance between energy

and daylighting performance
Peng Xuea,b,*, Jingchao Xiea,b, Jiaping Liua,b, Cheukming Makc
a
a
Beijing Key Laboratory of Green Built Environment and Energy Efficient Technology, Bei-jing University of Technology, Beijing, China
bbCollege of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China

cc
Department of Building Services Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

Abstract

Daylight has two characteristics: radiometry and photometry. Hong Kong is situated just south of the Tropic of Cancer and
receives a lot of daylight which could generate more lighting energy savings but bring solar heat gain at the same time. This
study appealed that the energy-efficient design should guarantee residents’ luminous comfort level first. A dynamic daylight
metric, average DA300 (Daylight Autonomy), was first tested to quantify occupants’ luminous comfort by using statistical
analysis with the data from questionnaire survey and climate-based simulation of 108 unit cases. The benchmark of Ave. DA300 is
then found as 29.6 %. A new parameter EDR (Energy Daylight Rate) was also proposed to reflect the relation between
daylighting performance and energy performance. Case study was conducted to optimize the green features’ design and validate
the utilization of EDR. The result showed the EDR could help optimize the envelope design at the early stage.
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 10th International Symposium on Heating, Ventilation and Air
Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 10th International Symposium on Heating, Ventilation and
Conditioning.
Air Conditioning.
Keywords: Luminous comfort; Energy-saving; Daylight autonomy; Uniformity; Statistical analysis

1. Introduction

1.1. Energy efficiency design about daylight

Daylight is a gift which brings people close to nature. Hong Kong has a high potential of utilizing daylight for
saving electric lighting energy as the outdoor horizontal illuminance exceeds 10 000 lux for over 80% of the normal

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 18813030116.

E-mail address: xp@bjut.edu.cn

1877-7058 © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 10th International Symposium on Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning.

1877-7058 © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 10th International Symposium on Heating, Ventilation and
Air Conditioning.
10.1016/j.proeng.2017.10.166
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office hours in a year [1]. Both the measured and simulated data showed the daily lighting energy savings could
reach to 8 kWh in spring and summer [2]. Up to 2012, the Electrical & Mechanical Services Department (EMSD
Hong Kong) reported that the lighting still consumes 13% of the total electricity end-uses, which ranks the second
following the space-conditioning 30% [3]. Better utilization of daylight and better control of lighting, such as
daylight harvesting systems and dimming control, can generate more lighting energy savings up to 60% without
consideration of the additional cooling energy benefits [4].
However, daylight has the characteristic of not only light, but also radiation. The solar heat gain becomes a
problem which daylight brings unintentionally and it will be transferred as the cooling load, which should be
removed by air-conditioning system. Hong Kong city still suffers from the fact that the annual total electricity
consumption of domestic sectors in-creased dramatically with an average rate of 6.67% per year over last 40 years
[5]. Therefore, how to balance the conflicting energy consumptions of artificial lighting and air-conditioning is a
major challenge in cooling-dominant climates. In order to achieve total energy-efficient objective, cooling load and
artificial lighting electricity should be considered simultaneously when optimizing annual energy-efficient design
related to daylight [6].

1.2. Satisfaction level of daylighting

So here comes a question, should the annual energy consumption as little as possible for energy-efficient designs?
The optimization process often involves sacrifices on daylighting performance to open opportunity for energy
performance in order to obtain an ideal energy balance. A new specific definition of daylighting combines daylight
availability, occupant comfort and energy efficiency [7]. Therefore, a rather unambiguous response to that question
is no and we propose here that the energy-efficient design should guarantee a luminous satisfaction level first.
"Luminous comfort" is a term that often appears in the study related to (day)lighting performance and human
psychology. However, the definition of luminous comfort in a scientific or professional sense has not yet to be
agreed upon. Some researchers qualified this comfort as illumination level; some treat it as luminance balance; and
some name it as glare problem. Based on our review of the literature, to assess residents’ preferences, a personal
questionnaire survey should be conducted for this kind of research. Hwang et, al. [8] advocated there was significant
correlation between the occupants’ satisfaction and luminance distribution. Xue et, al. [9] conducted a survey and
presented that external obstruction is the major physical factor affecting luminous comfort. Considering the actual
climate (the quantity and character of daily and seasonal variations of daylight) for a given building site together
with irregular meteorological events, dynamic daylighting performance metrics are now needed. Daylight
Autonomy (DA), Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI) and Annual Light Exposure (ALE) have been proposed as
dynamic or cumulative metrics in order to overcome static metrics’ limitations. All these dynamic metrics could be
obtained from climate-based daylight modeling (CBDM) and simulation. Adopting the dynamic metric to quantify
the people subjective preference has become a trend, thus the next step of the analysis is to decide what levels could
be treated as adequate. In this research, metrics are first tested to describe occupants’ luminous comfort by using
statistical analysis with the data from questionnaire survey and simulation of 108 unit cases. The relation between
the energy and daylighting performance are studied, and the Energy daylight rate is proposed for guiding the
envelope design at the early stage.

2. Methods

2.1. Questionnaire survey

A questionnaire survey was conducted among in a typical estate to obtain the residents’ subjective luminous
comfort in living rooms [10]. Participants chose the comfort level based on the Likert 5-point scale, where level 1
means strongly dissatisfaction and lev-el 5 representative strongly satisfaction. Participants were asked to answer the
questions based on the annual average feeling under average weather conditions. The type of the buildings is
Harmony Ⅰ (Fig. 1a) which takes up half of the total number (293/586) of Harmony Blocks. What’s more,
Harmony Block ranks first in the total amount of public residential buildings in Hong Kong. All the blocks selected
in the survey are all 40 stories and the floor area of each unit was between 45~60 m2 in size. Coded questionnaires
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were issued by mail, and 108 valid questionnaires were returned to the authors through collection boxes. These
coded questionnaires provide the exact physical information of the participants’ units. This information includes
orientation, floor level and shading devices of the living room (Fig. 1b). With further information of the exact
location and surroundings, external obstructions could be known for each unit (Fig. 1c).

Fig. 1. Physical environment of the target units: (a) building plan of HarmonyⅠ; (b) layout of a living room; (c) location of the blocks

2.2. Simulation

In order to simulate the real condition of the units and obtain dynamic daylight metrics, cli-mate-based daylight
modelling (CBDM) is essential. CBDM is the prediction of various radiant or luminous quantities using sun and sky
conditions that are derived from standard meteorological datasets. Climate datasets are representative of the
prevailing conditions measured at the site, and Hong Kong data was downloaded from Department of Energy, USA.
Physical models were first built in SketchUp, since it could be imported into both Daysim and EnergyPlus easily,
which were used in combination in this research. Daysim is a dynamic RADIANCE-based daylighting simulation
program that uses the concept of day-light coefficients and the Perez sky model to predict the short-time-step
development of in-door illuminance and calculate annual electric lighting energy consumption. EnergyPlus is a
building energy simulation program, which is based on the state-space techniques and sup-ported by Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory. Based on the fact that Hong Kong is in cooling-dominant climates and almost 60%
residents do not use any heating system all over the year, annual electric lighting energy and cooling load are
calculated by EnergyPlus.

2.3. Energy daylight rate

As daylight has two attributes: photometric and radiometric. When there is more daylight, both of these two
quantities increase. Aiming to evaluate the daylighting performance and energy performance at the same time, a
parameter, EDR (Energy Daylight Rate), is proposed. The calculation is shown as equation 1.

Energy Daylight Rate = ∆Total energy / ∆Ave. DA300 (1)

From the equation, the EDR can be both negative and positive. If EDR > 0, it means the in-creasing of
daylighting performance will lead an increasing of total energy consumption which also indicates the ETR >1. If
EDR < 0, it means the increasing of daylighting performance will lead a decreasing of total energy consumption
which also indicates the ETR < 1. It will be the very best condition that the total energy consumption reduces while
more day-light could be brought into the room. This new parameter can be used to check the effective-ness of the
designs of daylighting systems and shading systems.
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3. Results

3.1. Luminous comfort level by metrics

Based on the results from both questionnaire survey and simulation work, the relations be-tween luminous
comfort and daylight metric is studied. Bivariate association between luminous comfort and average daylight
autonomy is shown in Fig. 2 (1: strongly dissatisfied; 2: dissatisfied; 3 neither dissatisfied nor satisfied; 4: satisfied;
5: strongly satisfied).

Fig. 2. Bivariate association between luminous comfort and Ave. DA300

As shown in Fig. 2, Ave. DA300 presents a strong relations with luminous comfort level. This trend can be
described as wide scope at the low comfort level side and narrow scope at the high comfort level side. The values of
these metric have a relative narrow scope from the residents with the highest luminous comfort level, and this scope
becomes wider with the decreasing of the comfort level. In other words, the value of Ave. DA300 should not be too
high, either not too low. The low value indicates the lack of daylight, while the high value means too much daylight.
Too much daylight may bring problems to residents, such as overheat, glare, fading furniture, etc.
Referring to the thermal field, there exist at least 5 % people who feel dissatisfied even in the most thermal
comfort condition. That is to say the comfort never gets below 5 % dissatisfied. So if we make the benchmark like
this, it is essential to find the value that guarantees 95 % of the satisfied units above it. The satisfied category was
grouped with the luminous comfort of level 4 and level 5. The dissatisfied category was grouped with level 1 and
level 2, and the moderate category was grouped with the result of level 3. Therefore, with the total satisfied number
of 63, the benchmark of Ave. DA300 is 29.6 % (Fig. 6).

3.2. Optimization of windows (daylighting system)

In the high-rise residential buildings in Hong Kong, some of the inner units and lower units do not need the
shading system. Their living room may lacks of daylight and need a day-lighting system instead. To bring more light
into the room, enlarge the openings on the wall is the most common way. Enlarging a single window and opening a
secondary window are two different scenarios.
To enlarge a single window for the living room, 5 cases are built according to the reference case. The aspect rate
of the reference window is 1.25 and so do the other cases. The WWR (window to wall rate) of the reference case is
0.35 and the following cases are built with the WWR of 0.45, 0.55, 0.65, 0.75 and 0.85. The corresponding WFRs
(window to floor rate) are shown in Table 1. Another way to enlarge the window size is to open a secondary window
for the living room. As the outer ring units in Hong Kong residential buildings always have two outer walls, so it is
very likely and possible to open an additional window for the living room. 5 more cases are built according to the
Case 1 to 5. There is no change about the reference window, and the secondary window is set on the other side of
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wall in square shape. As the new cases have additional window on another wall, the WWR is not available. How-
ever, the WFRs of the new Case 6 to 10 are equal to the ones of Case 1 to 5 respectively, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Single window cases with different WFR (unit: m)

The two ways of changing window size has been presented, and the effective one should be selected by
comparing the results together. To make the comparison clear, the results of units facing south direction are
presented in Figure 3.

Fig. 3. Comparison between the two ways of enlarging window in facing south unit: (a) The comparison of Ave. DA300; (b) The comparison of
annual lighting energy consumption; (c) The comparison of annual air-conditioning energy consumption

From the Figure 3, with the same value of WFR, opening additional window has obvious advantages in
improving Ave. DA300 and uniformity than enlarging the single window. What’s more, it could also reduce the
energy consumption of artificial lighting. About the solar heat gains, both two methods have a similar results as the
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opening of the window is the same. The advantage of the secondary window can be concluded as it bring more light
to the poor daylighting condition area, while the other is not.
In these two scenarios, the energy of AC increases more than the reduction of artificial lighting. In other words,
the ETR value is more than 1. Considering both daylighting and energy performances, it is scientific and easy to
evaluate these two scenarios by adopting the new parameter, EDR. The result is shown in Fig. 4.

Fig.4. The EDR (slope) of two scenarios for enlarging window

In the Fig. 4, the slopes between the points are EDRs. When adopting daylight system, the EDR should be as
small as possible, even to the negative value. In other words, improving daylighting performance will lead to a
relative increasing of energy consumption even a reduction. As seen from the figure, the EDR for opening additional
window is smaller than enlarging as single window. It means that to improve the Ave. DA300 into the same level, a
secondary window will add less total energy for the unit. Therefore, it can be concluded that opening an additional
window is a better way than enlarging the single window. It’s better to open a second window in the living room no
matter how small it is.

4. Discussion

In the high-rise residential buildings in Hong Kong, some of the outer units and higher floor level units may need
the shading system to block more light into the room. To prevent direct sunlight and solar heat gains, most of the
public housing are integrated with overhangs out-side each units’ living room. To optimize the performance of the
overhang, three scenarios, namely overhang’s length, tilted degree and configuration, are often adopted. The EDR
method could also be used for selecting the best shading scenario. When adopting shading system, the EDR should
be as big as possible. In other words, compromising daylighting performance should lead to a relative decreasing of
energy consumption as well.

5. Conclusions

Daylighting performance is proposed to be considered before the energy-efficient design. A dynamic metrics,
Ave. DA300 were proved to be a key factor of luminous comfort by analysis of the data from both questionnaire
survey and climate-based simulation. In residential buildings, the threshold of Ave. DA300 is 29.6 %. To evaluate the
joint performance of a feature, the EDR parameter is proposed to assess the changing of daylighting and energy
performances. The Ave. DA300, uniformity and AC energy increase with the increasing of the window area, while
the lighting energy decreases. Considering the joint performance and assessed by EDR, opening a secondary
window is the effective way to meet luminous and thermal requirements.
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Acknowledgement

Many thanks to building owners and occupants for their responses. This work is supported by the Hong Kong
Environment and Conservation Fund under Grant ECF 23/2011. It is also part of the research activities of Beijing
University of Technology Research Foundation un-der Grant PXM2017_014204_500087.

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