Sunlight Autonomy for Buildings: A New Methodology for Evaluating Sunlight Performance in Urban and Architectural Design

Abstract

Due to urbanization and growing density in cities in the past century, metrics were introduced to assess daylight performance such as minimum sunlight hours and the daylight factor. The paper initially explores the shortcomings of early-stage daylight and sunlight evaluation methods. A novel methodology called Sunlight Autonomy (SA) is proposed for evaluating sunlight performance in buildings. The SA is based on the “Exposure to sunlight” criteria in EN 170307 “Daylight in Buildings,” where a computational method is used for the evaluation on a specified day. The SA concept expands the analysis temporally over the entire year, and spatially on building facades, leading to new metrics for a point of evaluation, and spatial metrics for buildings. The SA methodology is analyzed in a case study across four European cities. The SA metrics on facades between February 1st and March 21st, days in EN 17037, led to differences up to 63%. This revealed a significant shortcoming in EN 17037, relevant for Nordic regions. The differences of spatial metrics between March 21st and 50% of the year were within 5%, and up to 33% between February 1st and 75% of the year. The timestep affects the metrics and a window evaluation showed that the error of a 10-minute analysis was within 5% of daily insolation and 5 days for the annual SA. The potential of these metrics for urban planning and the architectural design process is examined. The interaction between SA and EN 17037, as well as other ongoing research developments, is discussed.