Smart Architecture Techniques For processing the optical Environment InUniversity Spaces

Abstract

The concept of intelligent and smart buildings became a turning point in architecture and construction fields over the last three decades which transformed the world to be smart world consisting of administrative, educational and service integrated intelligent buildings. As the world shifts to a more services-based economy, smart university should be created as new model of interconnected educational institution. Learning is the main activity at universities. Concept of traditional classrooms at universities has been changed nowadays to be ‘smart’ Learning spaces which correspond to the needs of our smart building era. These smart spaces contain not only blackboards, seats and tables, but also audio-visual (AV) equipment, video projector and screens, etc. The overarching goal of education is to provide a good visual environment for all the users, including students and instructors. Moreover, this electric evolution affects the visual needs of learning spaces. Therefore, glare control and visual quality became a critical issue for the view of students especially when they focus on the screens. Subsequently, smart learning spaces design and layout have a significant influence on lighting system and visual environment to accommodate the future trends of university learning spaces, provision of daylight in learning spaces can be considered as crucial not only for university but for other educational facilities as well. Many studies confirmed the positive effect of daylight on the learning environment, student performance and energy management of the educational facilities. Hence, using a smart-dynamic- techniques and integrated lighting system can positively contribute the achievement of well daylit learning spaces. The thesis is discussing the impact of using smart architecture techniques for processing the optical environment in university learning spaces .It consists of four parts and ends with the conclusions and recommendations. the first part (chapter one and two) discusses the evolution of smart technology and how it affects the concepts of buildings especially universities and learning spaces and transforms them from traditional to smart buildings with a fully integrated systems, besides illustrating the classification of learning spaces according to its type to define the significant type that needs to be studied which, in this case, is group teaching/learning spaces. The second part defines a design strategy for optical environment of teaching /learning spaces (Chapter three). The third part, (chapter four) investigates the impact of using smart systems and techniques to improve optical environment in educational spaces. The forth part (chapter five) introduces a design guideline for lecture hall in Cairo as a case study and analyzes its daylighting performance by assuming various window to wall ratios and louvers types along the four basic orientations to investigate the best cases. Smart Architecture techniques changed lighting design process completely, nowadays by virtue of simulations tools a lot of design concepts could be investigated to get the best case and optimum solution. Grasshopper which is a plugin for Rhinoceros and a parametric modeling and optimization tool was used to automate the simulation process in this thesis. Beside, DIVA plugin for Rhino was used to perform daylighting simulation based on Radiance and DAYSIM simulation engines. These tools allow for annual simulation and Daylight Availability computation as well as measurement of glare probabilities based on the new IES daylighting standard (sDA, ASE and DGP).