Week 11
This was my final week of internship at SBE, and it was a valuable end to a placement filled with exposure to real built environment ESD projects that I would not normally have the chance to experience in academia. Across the internship, I was able to work on a range of tasks including energy modelling, thermal-envelope assessment, embodied emissions reporting, water-sensitive urban design, hygrothermal analysis, and finally, complex geometry daylight performance modelling. Each project required a different way of thinking.
During this week, I completed and delivered the final project assigned to me, which focused on analysing spatial daylight autonomy for a high-rise residential building. After developing the 3D building model, I continued by modelling the surrounding buildings to investigate their effect on daylight access to the project.
This was an important part of the assessment because daylight performance cannot always be evaluated accurately by looking only at the proposed building in isolation. In a dense high-rise urban environment, neighbouring buildings can create significant external obstructions and reduce the amount of available daylight, particularly where façades are close to adjacent developments.
The results showed that the room with north-facing glazing orientation did not perform adequately against the applicable Green Star daylight assessment criteria used for the project. Although north orientation is generally expected to receive favourable daylight conditions in Australia, in our case the façade was heavily shaded by a tall neighbouring building.
Overall, finishing this internship has been a meaningful experience. I gained exposure to real project workflows, software tools, design constraints, and professional reporting expectations. More importantly, I learned that building performance modelling is not only about producing numbers from software, but also about checking assumptions, understanding the architectural context, interpreting results carefully, and translating technical findings into practical design recommendations. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from the SBE team and contribute to projects that involve sustainability, energy efficiency, building physics, and better design outcomes.
As a parting gift, I vibe-coded this sustainability wheel generator based on the SBE’s in-house rule of thumb assessment metric. I hope it could be used to streamline the image generation and scoring process that I did in previous weeks a little bit faster (it has a built-in percentage reduction calculator)
Signing out 22/06/2026, see you on other opportunities.
Rayhan Faturrahman Muhammad Rayhan Faturrahman | LinkedIn