Skylight Sizing based on balancing Daylighting Performance and Visual Comfort in Atrium Buildings

Abstract

As one of the most traditional and ubiquitous elements in architecture, atrium design has remained an imperative topic. With the growing concerns of energy conversation, carbon emission, comfort, and well-being recently, atrium design optimization to match the new crises and demands becomes a big challenge. This study investigated the impact of atrium shapes and building heights to daylighting performance. It was found that round atrium performs the best, next is square, and the worst one is the rectangle. And the higher the buildings are, the worse the daylight performance is. To further guide design work, generic atrium design criteria from a view of balancing daylight performance and visual comfort was proposed. The more reliable and valid annual dynamic simulation methods and climate-based daylighting modeling metrics are adopted.