Climate change, optimal shading design and visual-thermal comfort for office buildings

Purpose Shading devices in modern, highly-glazed offices can be practical since shadings can block extreme sunlight, which causes problems in visual discomfort and extreme cooling energy consumption, especially in hot climates. This paper aims to indentify appropriate shading for the mentioned offices based on their lifespan. Consequently, the period for weather data analysis is considered 2080. Design/methodology/approach The analysis optimizes daylight and cooling energy consumption in a simulated office model, and the research proposes a workflow to obtain the effect of each shading and different window-to-wall ratios on the energy consumption and lighting of office space. By Sensitive Analysis, the appropriate ranges for the parameters of each shading are determined. Daylight and energy consumption analysis was run in Ladybug and Honeybee plugins, and the optimization process was done with the Octopus plugin, according to the Genetic Algorithm. Findings Results indicate that an egg-crate shading system with a 70% WWR (window-to-wall ratio) is the optimal configuration, increasing useful daylight illuminance by 15.53% and reducing cooling energy consumption by 11.20% compared to the baseline scenario across the office lifespan. Originality/value This research evaluates the performance of common shading strategies for highly glazed offices, using algorithmic analysis to identify optimal and suboptimal scenarios for the Tehran metropolitan area.