Environmental challenges of outdoor LED facades

Placing LEDs on the exterior of a building doesn’t come easy. Especially when some of them are located close to the sea, extremely high or designed to deflect the wind. One is not only faced with the usual installation challenges, but also with the extremes in building and environmental challenges, including all four elements (sun, sand, wind and water).

Aside from that, the whole installation often has to be as quiet and as invisible as possible, as some of the country’s and even world’s most prominent people are based there. An element very crucial in both the planning and the way the installation would be done. True ninjas working under the cover of darkness.

TEMPERATURES
Between the bottom and the top of a tall UAE building can be a temperature difference of as much as 20°C. Summer temperatures can easily climb up to +50°C with overnight lows of around 30°C resulting in a +20°C temperature change, whereas the winter temperatures can go as cool as 19°C with overnight lows as cold as 6°C. That’s almost 50°C difference between winter and summer.

WIND
Large buildings are designed to bend with the wind. Even Burj Khalifa, being exposed to strong desert winds, more than others, between 2-4 meters. During the structural design of the tower, they measured the current maximum wind speeds and gusts, resulting in data showing: mean hourly winds of about 85km/h and 135km/h gusts.

SAND
Sand storms are common in the UAE, not only are the masses of flying sand an issue, but often the speed at which it travels.

WATER
It might not rain a lot, but the condensation of a building like Burj Khalifa results in a collection of 15 million gallons of water a year.