Case Studies: Buildings, Daylighting

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Thorsten Frost and his collaborators study the weathering of coatings on glass substrates. UV radiation plays an important role. These engineers exploit the SoDa Service to gain knowledge in the geographical distribution of the UV radiation and exposure difference in different European countries. Date: April 2007.

Stéphanie De Roux, from the company Butagaz used the SoDa Service as a one-shot usage, to obtain the maximum irradiance over its industrial sites. Stéphanie De Roux wrote that only satellite data can provide the informations on irradiance necessary to perform the computations and that the performance of the service was excellent. Date: March 2007.

SoDa for PVC systems and profiles. The Group Deceuninck comprises approximately 3000 employees worldwide. It specializes itself in compounding, the design, development, extrusion and finishing of PVC systems and profiles for the construction industry and in recycling. Mrs Dalle is the responsible for guarantees and certficates, wrote that among her duties, she has to determine the amount of global solar radiation energy per year in a specific place in the world in kiloLangley per year, to help in fixing the strategy where the different raw materials, lacquers and foils are to be sold depending on the limitations specified by the supplier (solar radiation, climates, temperatures, rain, relative humidity) and finally to set up a warranty certificate depending on the specific region, use of the product, climate and solar radiation. Due to an excellent collaboration with the team in charge of the SoDa Service, she can now perform most of these tasks in a single click. In addition to solar radiation, the SoDa Service provides temperatures, and, relative humidity. Furthermore, the SoDa Service produced a worldwide map of the radiation that provides at a glance an accurate knowledge of the climate zones. Exploiting the SoDa Service represents a true gain in efficiency and in accuracy. Date: January 2006.

Technical rules apply to building engineering; some of them relate to climate, including solar radiation and its three components: global, direct and diffuse. In France, it was shown that previous solar radiation data were obsolete (thermal regulation RT2000) and a new set is necessary (RT2005). The SoDa Service was used in this purpose in combination with data purchased to Meteo-France. It was found that using the SoDa Service provides a double benefit to create these new standards. It complements the data of Meteo-France when and where those are absent and provides in one click the three components while Meteo-France data are global radiation only and are to be entered into a specific software to obtain the other components. A revised standard data set was integrated into the standard RT2005. More on this story: Bruno Peuportier, Mines ParisTech / Armines, Center for Energy and Processes, 60 bd Saint Michel, 75272 Paris, France, e-mail: bruno.peuportier at ensmp.fr. Date: November 2006.

Katerina Meresi is an architect. She has a MSc on Environmental Design of Buildings from Cardiff University, UK and is currently a PhD student at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. Her research area is the Daylight Performance of Classrooms in Greece. She wrote "In the past I used Satel-Light for daylight information and skies frequency for Athens and Thessaloniki. Now I will try to take advantage of the services SoDa offers. For example, the sky frequency information is very useful because it gives you an idea of what sky types you should take more into consideration when, e.g., simulating a room in a certain software". Date: April 2006.