Visual comfort achievement in compliance with thermal comfort recommendations in educational buildings in Taif City, KSA

Abstract

Although thermal comfort is the most attractive human-environmental building function to be studied and applied in the internal building spaces; to conserve energy passively, especially in hot countries, visual comfort is also a key function to achieve a high internal environment performance; especially for several building functions, such as the educational buildings, which affects the energy consumption too. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), a recent concern was raised for applying green buildings as appeared in its vision 2030, which was followed by the concern of the environmental assessment of buildings. All environmental assessment methods emphasized the significance of the visual comfort requirements achievement beside the thermal comfort ones. Unfortunately, both functions have some contrary requirements that may affect the achievement of each other. Thus, any recommendations to achieve one of these functions should be studied for their effect on the other functions. This paper focused on the compliance of some previous thermal recommendations to be applied in Taif city's educational buildings and to achieve adequate visual comfort. The paper depended on the computing field, by using a professional lighting design software to analyze the effect on the daylighting characteristics in a classroom in Taif city when applying some thermal comfort recommendations. According to the results, the previous thermal recommendations should be modified to suit both visual and thermal functions, taking into consideration the variety of applicable thermal solutions that should be studied later on to not affect the visual comfort requirements.