Daylight performance through different types of glazing in the tropics

Abstract

Having glazing on buildings will allow natural daylighting in a room. There are four types of glazing which are commonly used in the market today: Clear, light green, bronze and black float glass where tinted glazing will provide shading to the interior. These four glass are being tested using Integrated Environmental Solutions Virtual Environment (IESVE) software with different proportion to investigate the influence of arrangements of glazing to permit daylight and to serve as shading device. There are 40 combinations of different glazing proportion tested in the simulation. The combination of 75 % clear float glass on a green float glass base gives the highest lux value at a point 90cm from the opening whereas the lowest value is exhibited through a 25% green float glass with a black float glass base of 75%. The finding shows that glazing with lower Visual Light Transmittance as the base will give a lower Daylight Factor compared to using it on top of the other glazing. Furthermore, although there is a large contrast of Daylight Factor between the 0.9m and 3.6m depth, several combination of glazing achieved the requirement of Malaysian Standard 1525 for daylighting in office.