Reading Break!
Feb 18th, 2012 by amilop
We’re glad that reading break is coming!
The week of February 13th was pretty busy for us (Labs, Reports, and Midterms), hence we were not as productive as usual.
However, we have some updates about the sun trajectory and at what times the greenhouse will be shaded by the dome of the Science World. In our previous calculation, we just assumed that the height of the building is infinitely tall, hence the greenhouse will be shaded at around 3pm all year long. Now, the spherical shape of the dome, and the height of the pedestal of the dome (i.e. the building that houses the lobby – we assumed it’s about 12m tall) are being considered. Therefore, we came up with new approximations.
The Greenhouse will start be shaded:
- at around 2pm on Winter Solstice (December 21),
- at around 3pm in October and March,
- at around 4pm in May and August,
- and around 5pm on Summer Solstice (June 20)
We used Sun Path Diagram (downloaded from http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/vancouver.html ) and superimpose it on the greenhouse on the Plan view of KSSP Science World sent by our client.
The Yellow colored area are the all possible trajectory path of the sun throughout the year. The blue line is the sun path during winter solstice (21 December), and the green line is the path on summer solstice. Those lines are also numbered (06, 09, 12, 15, 18, etc) to tell where the sun is at 06 o’clock, 09 o’clock, 15 o’clock, etc. The geodesic dome of Science World is located approximately at west-southwest of the greenhouse. Therefore, the greenhouse is more likely to be shaded sometime between noon and sunset.
The approximation needs a lot of iterations which will be too long to be posted on a blogpost. A more comprehensive explanation will be submitted along with the ECD (as our client asked). Our deliverables to the Science World will be an ECD, a report about material options for the greenhouse, and a report about the sun trajectory. The ECD will also be sent to Susan Nesbit.
Our possible next meeting with the client is on Thursday, March 1st 2012. Mila told us to avoid Friday, so that more people from Science World can attend the meeting for our presentation.
We are looking forward to it!
Cheers!
UBC CSL – KSSP Greenhouse Project