Active Transparent Façades; Experimental And Numerical Evaluation Of Daylighting

Today, the architectural design also places a great focus on another topic that is now widely discussed, and has fundamental importance for the survival of the human being and beyond: the environment. Due to the disruption of the natural equilibrium given by the unbridled use of the resources that have been made available to us, issues such as global warming, pollution, and environmental protection have begun to take their place within the problems of global interest. Creating an architecture that is sustainable should be the central point of every professional's work, to do this it is necessary to study not only the building materials but also the technologies and strategies that can be implemented to limit the environmental impact. Within this thesis, a particular discipline is considered that deals with both human visual comfort and respect for the environment. Daylighting is a phenomenon that, if studied carefully, can be a winning weapon for the objectives of well-being, comfort, energy-saving, and environmental sustainability. This study aims to investigate the applicability of active facades for increasing the adoption of annual-climate-based glare metrics and the enhancement of daylighting in the interior of buildings, to scale opportunities for more healthy, productive, and energy-efficient spaces for building occupants. The main objective of this thesis is evaluation of visual comfort for dynamic façade systems and smart glazing, specifically double-skin façade and generally aimed at answering the following questions: 1. Which simulation tools are more accurate and capable in terms of glare analysis? 2. How can the glare analysis be simplified through doing annual glare analysis instead of point-in-time glare analysis? 3. What is the correlation between annual glare analysis and point-in-time analysis? Therefore, the whole work was based on the evaluation of visual comfort, glare exploiting the potential of smart glazing and dynamic facade, through an experimental characterization and numerical simulation analysis. In parallel with the comfort objectives, the effect of the control strategies is also analyzed on the energy needs of a building, in terms of primary energy due to lighting.