Virtual Environment - Coursework Example

Virtual environment Virtual Environment Introduction Buildings demonstrate their value by virtue of the way people interact with them as single artifacts or as elements that fit within the urban fabric. They should therefore make reference to the street life to the city and the environment; they should be inviting, communicative and motivating. More importantly, they should part of our future. A building must meet the basic human needs to allow comfort ability. As architects, we strive to build buildings that have a long lasting social, ecological and spatial qualities; building that provide a real, tangible benefit to our environment. Summary The subsequent report represents a summary of all that I did to the two-storey office building, making it as suitable as possible as a working environment. First, I changed the orientation of the building to face west instead of south. Secondly, I added more windows on the east side of the building. Thirdly, I shaded the windows to reduce excessive sunrays in the building. Fourth, I decided to add roof lights at the roof ridges and lastly, I changed the interior design of the building to give an impressive appearance and to reduce cost. In the interior, I used suspended ceiling, installed ceiling fans and used tinted glass to partition the building. I also installed automatic door closer and rubber stops on the doorframe. In order for a two-storey office building to have a good working environment, there are certain factors that should have consideration. First, the building should face the sunrise to allow light penetration. In addition, shading should remain placed on the windows to prevent irritating sunlight in the working place. The rooms should also have adequate spacing and good air circulation to prevent stuffiness in the rooms. Besides the above, the building should have an automatic cooling system to eliminate the heat gained from the people around and from the computers. Fluorescent lighting should also remain considered and have a direct proportionality with the intensity of shading the windows. More importantly, the building should remain constructed on a plan to, capture the free heat during winter and reject the heat in summer. This is possible since geographically during winter and within the sky, the sun remains low compared to summer Changes description Since our base model was facing south, I decided to change the orientation to face east to facilitate penetration of enough lighting in the building. I added more windows on the east side of the building to facilitate enough lighting in the offices. I then used upward, tilted, south-facing glass to catch every bit of sun during winter and summer (Binggeli, 2013). Tilted glass maximizes heat gain during the winter months and at the same maximizes the same heat gain during the summer. By using tilted glass, it ensures that the building has enough lighting throughout the year. During summer, it is a fact that sunrays hit harder than during winter. For that reason, I decided to use interior window shading strategy. I used shades that are bright reflecting towards the outside in order to reflect back the solar radiation so as to allow only a little of the suns radiant heat in the building. Despite adding more windows, I also added roof lights at the roof ridges in order to allow natural daylight into the building. Roof light compared to windows will capture light irrespective of the sun’s position. Remarkably, the introduction of natural daylight in a building will allow the reduction of electric lighting or turning it off as long there is daylight. In spite of that roof light enables saving of energy, which results in low electricity, bills. De Montfort University did a research to measure the effect of roof lights on carbon dioxide emission from a building. The research had an hour-to-hour basis over a period of a year on buildings with roof lights. The university concluded that carbon dioxide emission reduces as roof light area increased. Conclusively, when roof light combines appropriately with lighting controls it saves energy and cost at the same time. Due to the growing population and hence the increase of building it was advisable and wise to use roof lights since it saves energy. Similarly, it also reduces emission of carbon dioxide (Roh, Tae & Shin, 2014). Additionally, I also made some few changes in the building that included the walls and the ceiling. I preferred using glass partitions that are modern and stylish in appearance (Crisinel, 2007). The reason for using glass partition was simple. One, glass partition effectively create a well sunlit and ample space for working. Despite of that glass partition gives an office a modern appearance. When an office has partition consisting of glass, chances remains that electricity bills will drop since there is maximum use of natural light. Moreover, glass partition is cost and time friendly since it takes little time to install and when modification is needed (Crisinel, 2007). Ceiling system is another part of the building I modified by using suspended chilled ceilings. Constructing chilled ceilings proceeds by suspending a metal grid from the structural slab. Tiles typically acoustical remains inserted into the grid to form the finished ceiling. The advantage of using suspended ceiling is that wire distribution and Ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems as well as light fixtures have easy access within the plenum space above the ceiling. There exists ease in modification of the suspended ceiling and it has acoustical characteristics that are an advantage in general office areas. Moreover, I installed artificial ventilation by using ceiling fans that allow a comfort zone up to 27 to 29 degree Celsius (Rayfield, 1994). The fans remain operational with an air speed of 1.0 m/s to avoid drafts and noise. By installing the ceiling fans, it will reduce the energy consumption for cooling by 30 % compared to using other cooling machines (Rayfield, 1994). As we all know that office should be as silent as possible, I went further to make sure that the building will be noise free. For this to be effective, I used automatic door closer and rubber stops to reduce noise, I covered the floor with woolen carpets, which reduces noise caused by the movement of people. The walls and the ceilings also had treatment with sound absorbent materials. Through these measures, taken disturbing noise will be history in the building (Binggeli, 2011). Result analysis With all the modification made on the building I will demonstrate a result analysis on the building. First, window size and the orientation shading, ventilation and high thermal capacity control the indoors dry resultant temperature (DRT). In occupied spaces the combined solar and internal casual gains (people, lighting, and computers) per unit floor area averaged over the period of daily occupancy should not be greater than 35 W/ meter squared calculated over a perimeter are not more than 6m from the window wall and averaged during 9 am to 5 pm GMT (Krishan,2001). The operative dry resultant temperature does not exceed 28 degrees Celsius for more than a reasonable number of occupied hours per annum (Krishan, 2001). In accordance with the requirements needed to make an office suitable to work in. The window size and the orientation shading and ventilation system I used will meet the standard wanted thus the indoors resultant temperature to remain constant all year. Below is an image to show air exit in an office and a graph to show indoor temperature during the day and night. The orientation of a construction has a considerable effect on its inherent energy demand. The office structure has determined distinctiveness based on materials used in building, window ratios, and elongation (Nasrollahi & Schäfer, 2013). The lowest heating demand occurs when the building faces almost south at 170 degrees Celsius. If the engineer opts to turn away the building from this orientation, to either west or east heating energy demand would increase. The building has its highest heating demand consumption at 40 degrees and 320 degrees. The heating energy demands of the office fluctuate by approximately 24 percent based on the varied orientations. (Below is a comparison of cooling and heating loads (kWh) in an office) Nevertheless, the cooling demand remains low in cases where the office building has a north orientation setting. The uppermost cooling demand occurs when building faces 110 degrees and 260 degrees. Cooling energy demands significantly decreases when turning the structure from an east west to a north-south direction or vice versa. Therefore, a building with a northeast, east or southeast orientation generates greater solar heat gains via the windows and the cooling energy demand is similarly high. The value of the building cooling energy demand fluctuates by approximately 28 percent based on the varied orientations (Nasrollahi & Schäfer, 2013). The figure below compares electricity consumption within an office. The office building had installation consisting of a chilled ceiling system to make the internal condition feel more comfortable. The ceiling absorbs the excessive heat to make the office cooler. The ceiling fans installed also play a big part in cooling the office since it blows away the excessive heat thus a good ventilation condition. According toYudelson 2009, air passes into the pressurized floor plenum of the spaces within the office and at 18 degrees Celsius, the air moves to spacious floor-mounted circular grilles. The temperature at which air passes remains considerably warmer than the standard 55 degrees F from overhead diffusers. As air circulates through the space, both persons and machines warm it; the heated air rises to meet the chilled ceilings. Then the air exhausted through the double-skin cavity to higher levels in the building. Office buildings should have a well-ventilated system to get rid of solar heat gains to enable good working conditions (Yudelson, 2009). Below is an illustration on how a building should be to avoid excessive solar gains. Use of 3D virtual environment 3D virtual environment is a networked virtual environment, which provides a consistent context for multiple users to obtain digital information, interrelate with the surroundings and directly converse with others. For instance, 3D virtual environment allows for design collaboration. These is whereby a process of dynamically communicating and working together is involved in order to collectively establish design goals, search through design problems, establish design limitations and build a design solution. For instance, adding windows, roof lights, suspended ceilings and using glass partition in a building are all because of using 3D virtual environment. To be precise, any parameter change you make to any of the windows would have reflection in all the instanced clones. Furthermore, if you add additional modifiers to any of the clones each will have the modifiers applied to the same position in its modifier stack. This is true because instance clones share modifiers in their respective modifier stacks. This sharing of modifiers is what distinguishes an instance clone from an ordinary copy (Harper, 2012). Like an instance clone, a reference clone shares modifiers in its modifier stalk, but in addition, it allows you to include modifiers with sharing capacity. For instance, like the use of roof lights at the roof ridges. Roof lights are a form of 3D virtual environment, hence improving the lighting designs in the building. Although this have visibility in a 3D virtual environment, sound always finds the path of least resistance, very least sound actually passes through low office partitions; it usually goes over the top of the partitions (Binggeli, 2013). When a speakers mouth is between 112 cm and 122 cm high and about a meter away from the partition, the partition should have an STC of 25 to 26. With greater distance, height an STC of 20 to 22 is permissible. Joints between partitions should remain carefully sealed because even small openings lower sound efficiency. Partitions should reach the floor and should remain adequate to assist in blocking direct line of sight voice transmission (Binggeli, 2013). In our case, since we used glass as our partition material very little sound can pass through thus the use of glass is another way of making use of the 3D virtual environment. In this instance, the use of glass makes the office have a classic appearance of which it is an implementation of what resulted after creation in a 3D virtual environment. Another example of a 3D virtual environment is the use of chilled dropped ceiling instead of gypsum boards that had use for ceiling and as walls. Through 3D virtual environment, the gypsum boards have no more application in modern offices (Binggeli, 2013). References Binggeli, C. (2011). Interior Graphic Standards. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Binggeli, C. (2013). Building systems for interior designers. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley. Crisinel, M. (2007). EU COST C13 Glass and Interactive Building Envelopes: Final report. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Harper, J. M. (2012). Mastering Autodesk 3ds Max 2013. Indianapolis, Ind: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Krishan, A. (2001). Climate responsive architecture: A design handbook for energy efficient buildings. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Pub. Co. Littler, J., & Thomas, R. (1984). Design with energy: The conservation and use of energy in buildings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Nasrollahi, F., & Schäfer, R. (2013). Architectural energy efficiency. Berlin: Univ.-Verl. der TU. Architectural energy efficiency. Berlin: Univ.-Verl. der TU. Rayfield, J. K. (1994). The office interior design guide: An introduction for facility and design professionals. New York: J. Wiley. Yudelson, J. (2009). Green building trends: Europe. Washington, DC: Island Press. Roh, S., Tae, S., & Shin, S. (2014). Development of building materials embodied greenhouse gases assessment criteria and system (BEGAS) in the newly revised Korea Green Building Certification System (G-SEED). Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 35, 410-421. Read More