Chameleon - Tool to design shading for planar and NURBS surfaces.

Design professionals are constantly researching innovative methods and systems that reduce energy use in buildings. The architectural design professionals are getting more conscious of regional climates and reduction of the building’s carbon footprint. Indeed, on that point are many research lines that we can follow; my alternative is to investigate those that come up to the building’s connectivity to the outside environment: The building’s envelope.
In recent years, daylighting of deep plans has become very important, not only to reduce the total energy consumption of the building but also to provide healthy spaces for the users. Daylighting helps to design a visually comfortable space depending upon the function of the space. But while focusing on daylighting designers are forgetting that extensive amount of day light will contribute for heat gain in the building. So, there should be an optimization between heat gain and daylighting.
This study generates a tool based on Rhino/Grasshopper, that provides optimized shading device design by analyzing facades with planar and non-uniform rational basis-spline (NURBS) surfaces. Currently there are no such tool available with Rhino/Grasshopper plugins.
The design tool allows users to explore various design configurations within the limits of input constraints with a parallel consideration to energy efficiency potential. This tool generates optimized shading devices to cut down radiative heat gain with optimized daylighting and minimal glare at any given period. This tool uses EPW data, shading profile angle equations, surface reflectance, sky component values for its analysis. By changing the control parameters several iterations of analysis is possible with this tool. The optimized results help to improve the energy efficient design solution for shading as an important solution in building envelope.
Chameleon imports standard Energy Plus Weather files (.EPW) in Grasshopper and creates a temperature graph to help the user to identify the analysis period for the design. It also simplifies the process of analysis, automates, and expedites the calculations, and provides easy to understand graphical visualizations in its own interface. It also allows users to work with validated energy and daylighting engines such as Energy Plus, Radiance and Daysim. Integration with the parametric tools of grasshopper allow for almost instantaneous feedback on design modifications, and as it runs within the design environment, the information and analysis is interactive.