Analysis of the impact of automatic shading control scenarios on occupant’s comfort and energy load

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Building envelopes should be responsive to boundary conditions changing in short-time, daily, or seasonal patterns. To this end, adaptive facades provide the ability to react or benefit from, outdoor fluctuations and dynamic indoor requirements. On the other hand, the parallel trend of developing new technologies to control their performance makes adaptive facades more applicable to counterbalance both user’s comfort and building energy load. This goal can be met using active control mechanisms, either manually or automatically. Automatic shading controls require indoor/outdoor signal inputs to operate a shading system. However, in the literature, there is no consent on the effectiveness of automatic shading control strategies and all of the studies were investigated within specific environmental conditions. Therefore, this paper aims to compare the most used control functions and their implications on user comfort and energy load in different climate zones. To this end, EnergyPlus was used as a simulation platform to employ an Energy Management System (EMS) for linking sensors, actuators to the control logic of adaptive venetian blinds. Then, a brute-force method was performed through Ladybug-tools to conduct 15,390 iterations parametrically. Results showed that climatic conditions impact the shading control scenario significantly, and the optimum scenario was an open-loop algorithm based on direct solar radiation due to the earlier activation of blind closure to block solar radiation while increasing lighting load at the same time.

?Highlights:

?Conducting a brute-force method to assess the impact of automated shading controls in 9 climate zones across the world

?Three environmental parameters are significantly effective on results.

?Higher improvements are observed in cities with high environmental variations.

?In the case of targeting a single objective an open-loop control mechanism performed better.

?Activation thresholds have the least impact on indoor operative temperature.

For Citation: Tabadkani, A., Roetzel, A., Li, H. X., Tsangrassoulis, A., & Attia, S. (2021). Analysis of the impact of automatic shading control scenarios on occupant’s comfort and energy load.?Applied Energy,?294, 116904.

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Programming skills can?help in solving computational and analytical problems. Therefore, it is required for all architects and engineers to learn and master a computer programming language. In this paper, we conducted a comprehensive simulation-based comparison among different control strategies, thresholds, and climates of automated shading systems. Five different open-loop and closed-loop automated shading controls were compared and their impacts on occupant's thermal/visual comfort and energy loads in an air-conditioned single office space through a brute-force approach. The simulations were done by creating a live linkage between Honeybee and EMS of EnergyPlus for a parametric study. We focused on answering the following research questions:

– What are the effective environmental parameters on automatic shading controls?

– What are the implications of shading control strategies on energy savings and indoor comfort??

This work is a part of the Ph.D. of?Amir Tabadkani?on occupant-centric control strategies for adaptive facades. His Ph.D. is supervised by prof.?Astrid Roetzel?and his follow-up committee members are @Hong Xian Li, and @Aris Tsangrassoulis at Deakin University.

We would like to share our publication in open access format with you:?https://lnkd.in/dHvEBkMN

This work can be beneficial for the European Solar-Shading Organization members including?Peter Winters?and?Anders Hall?and the ISO 52016 committee members including?Dick van Dijk?and @Hervé Lamy. Also, we would like to share the paper with the IBPSA group on Daylighting & Fenestration for Green Buildings?Mike Barker.

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