Improving Daylighting Utilization in LTH Study Center

Abstract: Daylighting is a free source of light that fosters a direct connection to nature. It has a great potential to enhance the health and productivity of the building inhabitants, to improve thermal and visual comfort in indoor spaces, and to increase energy efficiency in buildings. LTH study center (Lund, Sweden) is a compact building that was originally designed as a library. The building is nowadays used as a study hub. Due to its compact building form, unsatisfactory daylight conditions occur. This study focused on improving daylighting utilization in LTH study center. Continuous and proportionally larger wall and roof apertures can provide enough uniform light for such building. However, as larger glazing area were needed to improve daylighting, the building’s energy use assessment was also conducted to check if the increase in energy use is within an acceptable range. The improvement focused on side-lighting strategy, providing continuous side windows and more clerestories to allow daylight penetration deeper towards the building core. For the top-lighting system, the current position and size were kept, which resulted in negligible changes in daylighting level. Increased side-lighting measures yielded an overall increase in daylight level of the building. On the other hand, energy demand increased as expected, yet the increase was not significant. After adding more insulation to the building envelope, the reduction of energy use was marginal. Therefore, LCC analysis needs to be conducted to validate the necessity of adding more insulation layer. Moreover, by providing larger glazing area on the facade, the daylight level improved only in the peripheral zones but not in the core zones. To improve the daylight level in the core zones, further study of top-lighting solution is needed. In addition, with continuous side windows, the quality of the view out improved dramatically while the electric lighting dependency was significantly reduced.