Solar reduction of a vertical deciduous climbing plant canopy

Strategic integration of vegetation to reduce heat gain and to improve environmental quality is increasingly being adopted by building designers. One option to reduce solar gain is to grow climbing plants on a supporting framework external to a building. This is a relatively recent design feature that has little data available to predict its shading performance. This issue is being investigated through a collaborative research project between University of Brighton (UK) and Kasetsart University (Thailand). A thermal model which integrates the shading effects of different leaf layers and their coverage has been developed and experimental investigation started at the University of Brighton. Experiments were set up to collect the environmental and physical growth data of a deciduous climbing plant canopy. The results enabled the development of dynamic shading coefficients which represent the shading efficiency of the plant canopy at different time of its growing cycle. Similar experimental studies were performed at Kasetsart University but with non-deciduous plants. This paper reports on the work carried out at Brighton. It summarises the development of the thermal model, the experimental measurements and analyses to establish a time series function representing the dynamic shading coefficient. The dynamic coefficients were applied to a computer simulation programme to predict the effect of different percentage areas of the climbing plant canopy to indoor thermal conditions.