Harvesting Daylight in High-rise Office Buildings Using Phyllotaxis Model

Various researches have introduced methods to use daylight in office buildings in the Middle East zone, but none of them have ever considered the use of plant leaf arrangement, called phyllotaxis, as a comprehensive solution for harvesting daylight. The idea of the Phyllotaxis Tower has been raised for several years but the main question of this research is whether using the phyllotaxis model is capable of exploiting daylight in high-rise buildings or not. So, in response to this question, the main aim of the research was set to evaluate daylight efficiency in high-rise office buildings by presenting an exemplary and phyllotaxis-inspired design. The research method is encompassed several steps including, studying the literature on the subject firstly, then modeling a prototype building based on the Biomimicry Problem-Based approach, and eventually computer simulation to evaluate the performance of the proposed building. The results show that office units can get daylight illuminance of 500 lux at 50% of operating time per year in addition to proper performance on four single days of different seasons of the year. Furthermore, the sample building obtained label B of energy consumption from Standard No. 14254 presented by the Institute of Standards and Industrial Research of Iran, which has been compared with the energy label of 45 office buildings in the same location and same climate conditions, based on the figures are defined on the aforementioned standard and has the best performance among them.