Oppgave nr: BPO5

Related topics: 

  • Energy Management in Buildings (e.g., TEP 4235)
  • Building Performance Simulation (e.g., TBA 4166)
  • Building and Material Engineering (e.g., TBA 4171)

Background for the task:

Daylight is an important factor to good health, as it has shown to have an impact on the circadian rhythm, mental health, vitamin D production etc. Good daylight provision often requires large glazing areas, which might contribute to overheating because of exposure to sun. It is also identified that overheating during summer for well-insulated residential buildings even occurs in colder climates. This means that the combination of large glazing areas and well-insulated buildings may contribute to a poor thermal environment. The conflicting point of views focusing on good daylight provision and health or on thermal comfort and energy demand, illustrates the complexity of designing optimal buildings including all point of views. As daylight, thermal comfort and energy are disciplines that are closely related and dependent of each other, it is important to know the extent of their correlation regarding a building’s performance. Despite this, the trend is that daylight has traditionally been evaluated separately. With an arising focus on sustainable building design, this trend is changing, making it important to know their relations.

There are regulations concerning daylight in Norwegian Building Regulations, but there has been discussions about a negative development of the criteria the last ten years, as an effect of other regulations becoming stricter. In 2018 the first European Daylight Standard was released. Because of its new release, knowledge of the approach and criteria are still limited. 

Brief description of the task:

In this work, we will continue the work of our previous master student Helene Solvang. ((2018/2019). Daylight requirements in the Norwegian Regulations vs. the European Standard: A case study considering thermal performance. The tasks will consist of simulations and evaluations regarding daylight and thermal performance, but with a new approach and with new simulations software capable of performing dynamic simulations. The simulations performed in the previous thesis were static, thus it will be interesting to compare these results with new dynamic results, as well as ensuring a more realistic evaluation of the resulting thermal environment.   

Number of students on the thesis: One

 Contact person at IBAT:  

  • Mohamed Hamdy, associate professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, NTNU (mohamed.hamdy@ntnu.no).

External partners:

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