INTEGRATED COMPUTER SIMULATION FOR CONSIDERING DAYLIGHT WHEN ASSESSING ENERGY EFFICIENCY IN BUILDINGS

Daylight is an important strategy for reducing energy consumption in buildings. In order to predict it, the use of weather-based simulation programs that employ the Daylight Coefficients concept is recommended. EnergyPlus, a program for thermal energy simulation, is one of these tools; however, it has shown a significant limitation regarding the daylighting module, since it tends to overestimate daylight in internal environments. In order to get around this limitation, the present work proposes a methodology to evaluate energy efficiency, considering the use of daylight, through an integrated simulation using two distinct programs. This methodology entails evaluating energy and light performance through simulation using the Daysim and EnergyPlus programs. Daysim generates a report that describes the control of the artificial lighting integrated to daylight, which is used by EnergyPlus for calculating the final energy consumption in the analyzed environments. The results indicate that the proposed methodology is capable of compensating the limitations of EnergyPlus and, in this way, allow to evaluate energy efficiency in buildings, considering the admission of daylight. This work shows an alternative and reliable way for considering daylight when evaluating energy efficiency in buildings.