Chanadda Pongpattana and Pattana Rakkwamsuk

pp. 375 - 386

Abstract

The window is always part of a building envelope. It earns its respect in creating architectural elegance of a building. Despite a major advantage of daylight utilization, a window would inevitably allow heat from solar radiation to penetrate into a building. Hence, a window design must be performed under a
careful consideration in order to achieve an energy-conscious design for which the daylight utilization and heat gain are optimized. This paper presents the validation of the vectorial formulation of shading calculation by comparing the computational results with experimental ones, overhang, fin, and eggcrate. A computational algorithm and interactive computer software for computing the shadow were developed. The software was designed in order to be user-friendly and capable of presenting profiles of the shadow graphically and computing corresponding shaded areas for a given window system. It was found that software simulation results were in excellent agreement with experimental results. The average percentage of error is approximately 0.25%, 0.52%, and 0.21% for overhang, fin, and eggcrate, respectively.