Unified evaluation of total radiation in urban environments

The increasing complexity of modern architectural geometries emphasizes the need for more accurate simplified calculations of comfort analysis in architectural design. In most applications, the designer roughly estimates several parameters involved in thermal comfort that are very difficult to compute, among which the components of Mean Radiant Temperature (MRT) are notable. The goal of this paper is to propose a fast reliable technique, named Numerous Vectors (NV), to calculate MRT even in the presence of complex geometries. Considering the area, orientation, and distance of different radiant geometries, the process suggests an innovative method to find geometric-related parameters such as view factors by projecting the surrounding surfaces on a unit sphere representing the human body. The NV method is much faster than conventional methods. Moreover, all the geometry-related components of MRT including the radiation of individual surfaces, solar radiation, and the atmospheric radiation are calculated in one single step. The results are proved to be in a good agreement with analytical data.