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# How can we create daylight maps for each floor plan in Openstudio/Sketchup?

Can we generate daylight floor plans (i.e.: plans showing the lux levels at each point of the spaces) using sketchup/openstudio/radiance?

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Hi,

Yes, you can create a map showing the lux levels.

1) You have to add an illuminance map in your OS model.

2) If you want to change the number of the grid points, you can go in the Inspector / Illuminance map. You can change the number of X and Y Grid. I suggest you to change the Origin Z- Coordinate. This value represents the height of the illuminance map from the floor. Most of recent research suggest an height between 0,7m and 0,8m.

3) You can add a Daylighting control with Create a new daylighting control. You can change properties in the Inspector / Daylighting:Control. In the same way, you may change the Origin Z- Coordinate of your Daylighting control.

4) To get your illuminance map, you have to go in OpenStudio and add the Radiance Daylight Measure. You have to go in Measures / Electric Lighting / Electric Lighting controls and drag the Radiance Daylight Measure in the New always Run Measures.

5) You can look at the illuminance map in the results view after running a simulation.

I suggests you to look on other subjects for the results files.

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• The proper height of an illuminance map should correspond to best practice or be as dictated by metrics. North Amercian best practice for calculating horizontal illuminance in interior spaces, as well as IESNA LM-83 (standard for calculating spatial daylight autonomy) both dictate 30" (0.762m) above the finished floor for this. Not coincidentally, the Sketchup plugin will try to automatically place illuminance map objects at this height in your model (unless Sketchup tries to snap to a corner or something).

• You must associate your daylighting controls with the illuminance maps in order for the Radiance Measure to function properly.

• You don't HAVE to use Radiance to calculate these illuminance maps, you can also use EnergyPlus' internal daylighting engine. If you choose to just (and I do mean just) use EnergyPlus' daylighting engine, you don't even have to associate the maps and the controls. Just put the objects in the model and you'll get illuminance maps in the energyplus output. For what it's worth.

• Both of these methods will only show you spatial daylight illuminance distributions for rectangular areas and on a thermal zone by thermal zone basis. If you wish to see the daylighting across the entire building, perhaps floor by floor, you will need to get creative and take the numeric/merged_space.map and output/merged_space.ill files and map the spatial data in the .map file to the (hourly-indexed) illuninance data in the .ill file. This is an exercise for the community at large. =)

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