Shade-screens are widely used in commercial buildings as a way to limit the amount of direct sunlight that can disturb people in the building. The shade screens also reduce the solar heat-gain through glazing the system. Modern energy and daylighting analysis software such as EnergyPlus and Radiance require complete scattering properties of the scattering materials in the system. In this paper a shade screen used in the LBNL daylighting testbed is characterized using a photogoniometer and a normal angle of incidence integrating sphere. The data is used to create a complete bi-directional scattering distribution function (BSDF) that can be used in simulation programs. The resulting BSDF is compared to a model BSDFs, both directly and by calculating the solar heat-gain coefficient for a dual pane system using Window 6.

Date Published: 29 August 2008
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 7065, Reflection, Scattering, and Diffraction from Surfaces, 70650R (29 August 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.795575

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7065:
Reflection, Scattering, and Diffraction from Surfaces
Zu-Han Gu; Leonard M. Hanssen, Editor(s)