The determination of daylighting design failure factors in educational buildings / Wan Nur Hanani Wan Abdullah

The idea of natural lighting is to provide daylighting to the building area. Daylight is
determined by the local climate and is influenced by factors, such as orientation,
building surroundings, and location, during the first stage of building construction.
Implementing natural light design to a building is challenging, and educational
buildings involve optimal lighting conditions. There is a significant expense pressure
as most educational buildings use high lighting energy due to occupants’ daily
working hours usage. This research investigates the daylighting design failures in
existing educational buildings at UiTM Perak. Daylighting design failure occurs when
it wastes the capability to achieve its intended function. Therefore, this research aims
to determine the actual illuminance level in the studied classrooms to ensure that
existing classrooms have insufficient indoor daylight and identify different classroom
characteristics contributing to daylighting design failures. At the end of this research,
it focuses on recommending the best daylighting design solutions for classroom
spaces. This research employed a quantitative method, a fieldwork measurement and
classroom characterisation observation as the research methodology. Thus, a series of
fieldwork measurements were performed in the studied classrooms for five (5) days to
determine the classroom’s actual illuminance level. This research measured indoor
and outdoor lighting levels to evaluate the classrooms’ daylighting levels in different
building forms. Hence, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was used to
identify factors contributing to inefficient daylighting design in studied classrooms.
Six (6) factors affect daylighting performance, and those factors were used to conduct
an observation. Fieldwork evaluation revealed that two out of three studied classrooms
did not achieve the indoor illuminance level as stated in MS1525:2019. It was noticed
that, overall, one of the studied classrooms achieved an acceptable range of Daylight
Factor (DF). However, the other two classrooms were below the recommendations.
The results found that the illuminance levels were not within the standard due to
several factors contributing to the classroom design characteristics. Based on the
observation analysis, the main factors contributing to design failures are poor
classrooms orientation, double-loaded building with single-sided windows, small
glazing area, low window placement, inappropriate glazing properties, and low light
reflectance value. The classroom characteristics provide an advantage to achieve an
optimum value of daylighting. This research contributes to the best practices of
daylighting design for classrooms by providing recommendations to solve daylighting
design failures in the existing classrooms. Finally, it is hoped this research will
contribute to the discovery of problems impacting poor daylight efficiency in
educational buildings, which can be used to foster a greater understanding of the
benefits of daylighting for occupants.