This is a genuinely independent render of the same physical model, not a flattened camera angle: the 3D version orbits a textured box pair with an instanced-mesh leaf canopy and floating vapor sprites, while this 2D companion draws a flat side elevation you pan and zoom directly, with the canopy and rising vapor drawn as native 2D primitives on the same devicePixelRatio-aware canvas. The underlying steady-state energy balance is identical and solved every frame by the same 8-iteration Newton–Raphson loop:
h(T − T_air) + εσ(T⁴ − T_sky⁴) = Q_abs
h = 5.7 + 3.8·v (wind convection, W/m²K)
σ = 5.67×10⁻⁸ W/m²K⁴ (Stefan–Boltzmann)
The living wall's canopy intercepts sunlight following the Beer–Lambert law, with extinction coefficient k ≈ 0.6:
Shading fraction SF = 1 − e^(−k·LAI)
Q_leaf = α_leaf · SF · R_solar
LE = f_transp · Q_leaf (latent heat carried away as water vapor)
Only the unshaded (1 − SF) fraction of sunlight reaches the wall directly; the canopy also blocks wind and sky view at the wall surface, so its effective convection and radiation coefficients drop with SF. The result: shading cuts the energy load, and evapotranspiration removes what the canopy does absorb as latent heat instead of sensible heat — exactly why living walls measurably lower building-envelope temperatures in the real world.
- Solar irradiance — incoming shortwave flux on the facade.
- Leaf area index — canopy density; higher LAI shades more of the wall and draws more leaf dots.
- Soil moisture — how much of the canopy's absorbed energy the plant can shed as evapotranspiration versus sensible heat.
- Wind speed — raises the convective heat-transfer coefficient on both surfaces.