Week 10 Log
This week marked another transition in my internship placement at SBE. On the first day, I revised my embodied emissions report for the aquatic centre project. This involved rechecking the material quantities and reporting structure to make sure the results were presented in a manner that can be useful for the architects.
Later in the week, I started a new project exploring the spatial daylight autonomy (sDA) performance of a high-rise residential building, classified as a Class 3 building. This was my first experience doing daylight modelling of a high-rise residential-type building that is surrounded by several other high-rise building, so there was a learning curve in understanding how to set up the geometry efficiently without making the model unnecessarily repetitive or difficult to manage.
A key technique that I learned was to first model a representative typical floor and then apply the glazing tags before duplicating it across the building height. Since high-rise developments often consist of many repeated levels, this workflow is much more efficient than modelling every floor individually. It also helps maintain consistency between typical floors and makes future amendments easier, especially if improvements or other modelling (e.g energy model).
The focus of the project is to understand how much of the occupied floor area receives adequate natural daylight over the year. Spatial daylight autonomy is an annual daylight metric that evaluates the proportion of an area meeting a target daylight illuminance for a defined percentage of occupied hours; for this specific project, Green Star daylight criteria v1.1 for apartment building were used as the requirement:
“In at least 95% of units, at least 60% of the combined regularly occupied areas of each unit receives high levels of daylight with at least 20% of each bedroom and living area having high levels of daylight. Daylight is calculated using Daylight Autonomy, measuring illuminance for at least every hour within the nominated hours. A Daylight Autonomy of at least 160 lux for 80% of the nominated hours is provided to be considered as providing high levels of daylight.”