Predicted Impact of Linear Roof Apertures on the Energy Performance of Office Buildings

摘要

An investigation has been made of potential lighting electricity reductions and associated thermal impacts of replacing electric light with sunlight admitted through rooftop glazing on a single-story, prototypical office building. Experimental scale models have been used to determine the fraction of the solar radiation entering the aperture which reaches the work plane as useful illumination. This information is used in a developmental version of the building energy analysis computer program BLAST-3.0 to predict reductions in lighting electricity and the impacts on energy consumption for heating and cooling the building. The results indicate that a large fraction of the electricity consumed for lighting a single-story office building can be displaced using modest amounts of glazing in the roof. Also, both heating and cooling energy consumption reductions are possible from a daylighting system, but they are substantially smaller than the potential lighting electricity reductions. The design implications of the results are discussed and future directions for the work are outlined.