A user detective adaptive facade towards improving visual and thermal comfort

Abstract

Adaptive skins and, in particular, adaptive façade play a significant role in the future of environmentally friendly spaces. Meanwhile, occupants' involvement in the process of adaptive façade design and operation is essential to guarantee its usefulness. This study aimed to address two less-attended issues in current literature in the process of adaptive facade design. First, a few research attempted to include users during adaptive facade design processes. Second, less attention is given to the simultaneous optimization of both visual and thermal comfort during adaptive façade design. Given these, an innovative methodology is developed to involve occupant's/s' position inside space while considering comfort issues. Another novelty of this study is the geometry associated with double-sided material. Improvement in visual comfort quantity and heat gain are the objectives of this study for the position of occupant/s. Parametric simulation and Genetic algorithm optimization have been used to carry out this research. On average, there was a 76% improvement in visual comfort of the occupant throughout the year by the proposed system compared to the conventional shading state. Besides, there was in average 60% improvement for the heat gain improvement via the proposed adaptive facade compared to the conventional shading state when the objective function was set to increase the heat gain. Also, when the objective function is set to decrease heat gain, a 59% improvement has been achieved compared to no shading state. Finally, the proposed adaptive facade and the innovative method of design can be used to address the position of the user/s inside space to enhance visual and thermal comfort.