Assessing the cooling effect of urban textile shading devices through time-lapse thermography

Abstract

The overheating of the street surfaces has negative impacts on pedestrian comfort and cooling energy consumption. During the past few decades, extensive research has been carried out on heat mitigation technologies. However, there is limited knowledge on the efficacy of textile solar protections at the urban scale. In this paper, we investigate the cooling potential of sun sails on urban surfaces based on field measurements carried out in several streets of Cordoba (Spain). To this end, we develop a novel method based on time-lapse thermography at street level that allows for assessing the thermal behavior of urban scenes, in a comprehensive and agile way. Results show that high-mounted sun sails have a global cooling effect over the street, regardless of its orientation. Decreases due to sun sails in ground temperature reach up to 16¿C, and in façade temperature, up to 6¿C. Our observations demonstrate that sun sails can provide a heat mitigation efficacy similar to standard technologies while entailing softer levels of intervention.