Daylight Annual Illuminance Investigation in Elementary School Classrooms for the Tropic of Lhokseumawe, Indonesia

Abstract

This study investigated twenty-two (22) state elementary schools, regarding daylight annual illuminance in the classrooms, using climate-based daylight modelling (CBDM) metrics. This is due to the missing information on the annual daylight performance inside the classroom in Indonesia. Over 250 classrooms were assessed using Rhinoceros and Grasshopper computational platforms. Furthermore, the Days simulation engine was employed through the advantage of Ladybug tools to connect and automate the simulation workflow parametrically. Since there were no prior studies using CBDM metrics for daylight assessment of classrooms in the Indonesian context, the illuminance range from 250 to 750 lux was taken as the target for the annual useful daylight illuminance (UDI), as suggested in the Indonesian daylighting standard. The result shows 35 classrooms under the good daylight performance,171 classrooms insufficient category and 50 others under unsatisfactory of annual illuminance. The most sensitive contributors are both corridor and back shading depth with Spearman correlation of -0.70 and -0.76 respectively. The strong sensitive variables both have p-values lower than 0.05 which indicates statistical significance for the model.

Keywords

• daylighting
• elementary school classrooms
• climate based daylight modeling
• computer simulation
• annual illuminances