Reconfigurable Daylight
by Marcy Marro | December 1, 2021 12:00 am
Grouping TDDs together minimizes rooftop apertures while creating fully daylit interior spaces
Multiple TDDs are grouped into a single structural curb, providing easy rooftop flashing and simple integration into the building’s structural design.
But what are the advantages at the building envelope level? Unlike traditional fenestration (windows and skylights), the unique optical characteristics of a TDD’s capture/transfer/deliver components, the ability to gang multiple TDD apertures on a single architectural or structural curb allow the designer to minimize the number of required rooftop penetrations required to effectively daylight the building’s interior. These functional details can provide key benefits of reduced roofing/flashing complexities, improved ability to integrate the effective use of human-centric and energy-efficient daylight illumination with building-integrated photovoltaic (PV) and vegetated roof applications, and reduced structural implications enabling improved structural design flexibility.
With any roofing system, the objective is to minimize the potential for roof leaks. By ganging multiple TDD dome and flashing systems into a single architectural curb, the number of required rooftop penetrations can easily be reduced to one quarter of the number of flashed openings as might typically be required for a quality skylight-based daylighting solution. As a result, the number of potential roofing leaks are significantly reduced, providing the building owner with decreased maintenance costs and improved functionality over the building’s life.
This ability to gang multiple TDD apertures onto a single architectural cub means that TDDs can be an easy and effective means of harvesting daylight for buildings with rooftop photovoltaic panel arrays, since the TDD apertures can be grouped to fit within the PV modules, allowing the PV arrays and daylight harvesting technologies to easily coexist on the building rooftop. Ganging multiple TDD rooftop apertures onto a single curb also makes TDDs a wonderful daylighting solution for buildings that use green/vegetated roofing systems.
The Optical Light guides of TDDs enable daylight to be ducted to the buildings interiors for effective, usable daytime illumination.
The unique ability to group TDD flashings onto a single architectural curb also eases structural design flexibility. Since TDDs are designed to effectively distribute harvested daylighting throughout the building using advanced optical light guides, the rooftop apertures can be easily displaced from the location of where the daylight is used in the building’s interior. As a result, a single-ganged flashing system can be used to effectively daylight multiple interior spaces, whether they are on the same floor, or even different floors of the building. The ability to untether the rooftop apertures from needing to be located directly over the space being daylit means that the rooftop apertures can be located where they naturally fit within the building’s structural system and layout, thereby simplifying the structural design complexities associated with traditional skylight-based daylighting solutions.
Additionally, the TDD’s ability to duct daylight to where it is needed also means that TDDs allow for future interior design layout flexibility. In the future, if the building’s interior layout changes, the TDD’s optical light guide system can merely be disassembled and reassembled with the interior daylight fixtures having been moved to new, ideal locations. As a result, unlike traditional skylight toplighting solutions, a TDD daylighting solution is adaptable and reconfigurable over time.
The TDD’s unique ability to support ganged rooftop apertures make a TDD-based daylighting solution an excellent option for adaptive reuse of buildings with existing, aging skylights. In these applications, the original skylight curbs can be repurposed by replacing the old skylight with new 21st century-TDD daylighting technologies to capture and distribute glorious daylight to the building’s interior spaces. By repurposing existing skylight openings with multiple TDD systems, the architect and building owner can effectively breathe new life and efficiency to an aging building’s design without requiring a redesign of the building’s structure and roofing system.
Neall Digert, Ph.D., MIES, is vice president of Vista, Calif.-based Solatube International Inc. To learn more, visit www.solatube.com[1].
- www.solatube.com: http://www.solatube.com
Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/reconfigurable-daylight/