INDALUX software package for characterizing solar and daylight access in urban areas

Download

INDALUX software package is available as open source as a tar archive file from: this link. The software has been entirely developed on the LINUX system and absolutely requires to have the Radiance software properly installed on the same computer. We can provide an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS virtual machine (suitable to be used either on MAC or PC through virtualbox) where Radiance and INDALUX are already preinstalled. Feel freee to ask.

License

INDALUX software package (Copyright © 2018 R.Compagnon) is freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3. Some programs included in the package make use of libraries included in the Radiance software. To properly compile those programs, the Radiance source code must be available on the computer. Some programs included in the package make use of the NREL's SOLPOS 2.0 source code which is included in the distribution.

History and credits

This software package has been progressively developed over the years from parts of the outcomes of several research projects which benefited from various funding sources:

European project PRECis «assessing the potential of renewable energy in cities», 1998-2001: development of cumulative sky models from irradiation data provided by Meteonorm software
European project RUROS «Rediscovering the Urban Realm and Open Spaces», 2001-2004: first developments of multishading masks
Short leave stay as visiting research associate at SERIS (Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore) in 2012: first developements of effective envelope area pictures
Internal funding from HEIA-FR (Haute Ecole d'Ingénierie et d'Architecture Fribourg), 2014: development of the IBIC online demonstration tool
Joint project "Daylight masterplan" between HEIA-FR and ARUP (London and Berlin offices), 2015: tests of various indicators for characterizing solar and daylight access
INDALUX project (hence the name of the package...) at the Smart Living Lab funded by HEIA-FR and a grant from ARUP (London and Berlin offices), 2017: new developments for taking into account inter-reflections, refined version of the software and applications to case studies. 2018: development of the UBC online tool to evaluate solar and daylight access in urban canyons of parametrable sizes

References

These references describe the methods and use of the tools included in the INDALUX software package:

R. Compagnon, J. Goyette-Pernot
Multishading masks: a new method for assessing solar penetration in open spaces
PLEA 29th Conference, Sustainable Architecture for a Renewable Future PLEA2013, Munich, Germany, 2013
R. Compagnon
Evaluating solar irradiance on urban sites by superimposing Radiance pictures
13th International Radiance workshop, London, UK, 2014
R. Compagnon, G. Antonutto, P. Longato, A. Rotsch
Assessing daylight and sunlight access in the built environment: a new tool for planners and designers
PLEA 31st Conference, Architecture in (R)Evolution PLEA2015, Bologna, Italy, 2015
Ch. Chatzipoulka, R. Compagnon, J. Kaempf
An Image-Based Method to Evaluate Solar and Daylight Potential in Urban Areas
2018 Proceedings of the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design, Delft, the Netherlands, 2018
R. Compagnon, Ch. Chatzipoulka
A Simple Tool for Assessing Solar and Daylight Access in Urban Canyons
Eurosun 2018 conference, Rapperswil, Switzerland, 2018