An overview on solar shading systems for buildings

In recent years, different types of solar shading devices have been proposed, depending on building orientation, location, window characteristics, etc.. They can contribute to improve or worsen building thermal and lighting performances both from an energy and comfort point of view. The present paper reports a critical analysis of some studies that investigate shading devices' effects on building thermal and/or lighting performances. This article points out the difficulty in comparing the different results given the lack of uniformity between the studies, since they analysed buildings with different characteristics, locations and using various indices. Therefore a protocol to carry out this type of studies should be developed in order to allow the comparison of the different research investigations performed all over the world. Moreover, this paper shows that thermal comfort, economic and environmental aspects related to the use of shading devices were rarely analysed. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).