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The development of a "National Lighting Code" aims to standardize lighting design, ensuring uniformity and accuracy. Given that lighting significantly contributes to global electricity consumption due to its essential role in buildings, optimizing lighting design is crucial. This paper highlights the importance of efficient lighting design strategies, including the utilization of daylight, to enhance visual comfort and reduce energy consumption.
Lighting system is one of the most important system in buildings beside heating, ventilation and air condition (HVAC) and other office equipment loads.
A good design can contribute energy saving to great extent and also improves the visual comfort as well as efficiency of the occupants.
Lighting usage marked as the major portion of the overall electricity consumption across the globe. This is due to the use for a long time and it is an essential element of any building. Normally, in commercial buildings, the lighting load is nearly to 50% of the total electricity consumption. In fact, for some buildings, it exceeds 90% of lighting energy consumption and become unnecessary expenses due to greater and excess levels of illumination.
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Therefore, the design of the lighting system becomes one of the most important & critical elements at the beginning stage of design for a building.
Effective and efficient strategy of lighting design, including natural daylighting, can give illumination at the proper level and reduce the electricity consumption as well as energy. A lot of money can be saved, if the designer knows how to design a lighting system effectively and efficiently.
In addition, it is also important, because many problems may occur by poor lighting system such as bad impact on the efficiency of the occupants like eye strain, moods.
Illumination in the workplace is one of the factors, which substantially impact on worker, his performance, error rate and last but not least his health. It is necessary to create the suitable illumination of environment for the sake of interpretation of needed working performances and provision of efficiency. This can also be explained how light is important for the normal circadian rhythm of human beings.
Efficient lighting design helps in achieving the energy efficient buildings with maximum utilization of daylight, which is mostly neglected during the design stage. With the consideration of daylight during design stage helps in reduction of energy consumption to great extent. Thus, helps in protection of environment and reduction of consumption of electricity units, reduction in carbon footprints.
The illumination can be divided in to the three basic types
This part covers the essential parameters to be considered and required special attention of designer during lighting design –
Sun is the ultimate source of energy for the planet “Earth”. New techniques and methods are evolving day by day to get maximum utilization of sun’s energy. This aspect cannot be ignored during designing a lighting system for a building. Amount of sunlight depend on the day condition. It varies according to the changes in weather conditions. During summer season, enormous amount of sunlight is available. But excess sunlight during summer season may increase the heat radiations and this may result in increase of the HVAC Loads. Excess sunlight for illumination purpose during summer season can be controlled by using window blinds at suitable places. Even office and commercial buildings are being constructed by using glass panels in place of brick walls to harness maximum amount of daylight during day time. With the maximum utilization of daylight, it will help in reduction in dependency upon artificial illumination. This will result in reduction of electricity bills to great extent.
Computer programs are available (even at free of cost) such as DIALux EVO which helps to design lighting system along with utilization of daylight option. Such type of computer program is developed with in-built functions to calculate the levels of daylight illumination which is highly accurate and realistic. These types of computer program help to determine which and how many light fixtures will be required to energized.
Whereas in comparison to manual calculation for daylight will be complicated, difficult and also not accurate. Hence, suitable computer program with 3D model rendering such as DIALux EVO shall be used for accurate and realistic results.
Also, numerous of light manufacturer light fixtures are available with in-built sensors which can activate the dimming of light fixtures as per the daylight conditions.
Effects and Appearance of an object due to light beam cannot be imagined by anyone. Presently, many companies have launched light fixtures with RGBW (Red, Green, Blue, White) technology, in which only single fixture can be used to create millions of colour combination. Appearance of an object changes as per light beam fall on it and this cannot be imagined by anyone. Light fixture manufactures mark their product with CRI (I,e. Colour Rendering Index). Colour Rendering Index (CRI) is a measure of a light source's ability to show object colours realistically or naturally.
In other words, to accurately render all frequencies of its colour spectrum when compared to a perfect reference light of a similar type. This index of a fixture provide the accuracy in terms of appearance of an object when light beam fall on it. Main purpose of Lighting Design is to obtain the desired illumination level inside rooms, at a surface or as required for actual site condition. During lighting design stage, various factors played important and critical role. To design the lighting systems for a building, the following information must be obtained in advance: room length, room width, ceiling height, suspension height, working plane height, ceiling colour, wall colour, floor colour, window condition, whether the room using fan or air-conditioned, around condition, and type of room (lecturing, dining, etc), maintenance factor, texture material/colour, reflectance factors of surfaces (for wall, ceiling, floor), occupancy level, etc. These parameters cannot be ignored while designing a lighting system for a building.
Various methods are adopted by the designers for lighting design viz. a viz. Photoshop Editing, Manual Method and by using globally accepted & recommended computer programs. These methods are discussed in further details.
Submission of Lighting Design by using Photoshop Software for creating lighting effect is inappropriate and incorrect. Photoshop Software is nowhere related to lighting design. In Photoshop Software, designers used to create lighting effect by using a photograph. Further, with the arrangement of these modified photographs in form of MS PowerPoint, a movie type effect created which attract the clientele. But such type of illumination design does not provide the accurate results such as illumination level, total energy consumption, glare level, uniformity of illumination level, etc. It is worth mention here that while light illumination is designed for any building / area / or any other place, many factors play important roles to the great extent, such as maintenance factor, texture material/colour, reflectance factors of surfaces (for wall, ceiling, floor), occupancy level.
These factors greatly affect the quantities of light fixtures and also the quality of the illumination design. These factors cannot be considered in Photoshop while designing a light system for a building or an area. Even lighting design using Photoshop Software does not provide the different parameters related to fixtures during the design stage such as mounting height, location co- ordinates and projection angle, which are requisite during execution stage of the project.
When beam of light comes out from a light fixture, nobody can predict the direction of light beam and also how will the surface appear when light beam fall on it. Then, how can lighting design by using Photoshop can be recommended and accepted by the Light Designers. Hence, lighting design by using photoshop software is a wrong practice and shall be discouraged by the designers as well as end-users.
There are a wide range of manual computation methods for the calculation of different lighting aspects. Further, ready-made excel sheets are freely available on internet for manual calculation. In this type of manual calculation method, calculations provide the number of fixtures as per Sq.Ft area and number of fixtures per lux for indoor lighting.
The basic assumptions while using manual calculation methods are:
Thus, lots of essential parameters necessary for lighting design are only assumed while using manual calculation methods. Due to such assumptions, the results will not be accurate and real. Thus, output result based on these assumptions will produce poor and inaccurate results. Further, calculation of luminance level on all the surfaces in a room, the calculations will be extremely laborious and could only be justified in the most special cases.
These types of manual calculations have restrictions and may not give accurate and real time simulated results. Also, results obtained from manual calculation methods become obsolete while designing illuminance system for an entire building which is having numerous of rooms with different purposes. In manual calculation method, interaction of different scenes and partitions cannot be considered.
Further, this method cannot be used for calculation of daylight factor. Thus, manual calculation method fails while designing the lighting system of complicated buildings which are having numerous of rooms with non-uniform heights, glass partitions, etc. Thus, the accuracy of manual calculation method has restricted for only single rooms, small spaces. Complete lighting design of entire area and building is not possible by using manual calculation method.
In contrast to above, lighting software provide flexibility in illuminance design to great extent. The results obtained by using lighting software are more accurate and real time simulated in comparison to the manual calculation method.
Advanced software like DIALux EVO facilitates accurate and realistic lighting design by integrating daylight utilization. These tools offer precise calculations of daylight illumination levels, surpassing the capabilities of manual calculations. Furthermore, light fixtures equipped with sensors can adjust brightness based on daylight, enhancing energy efficiency.
Lighting simulation software offers numerous benefits, including the flexibility in luminaire selection, accurate modeling of directional luminaires, and comprehensive calculation of illuminance and luminance on all surfaces. The ability to create detailed 3D models and simulate various lighting scenarios allows for more informed design decisions.
The following table summarizes the advantages of using simulation software over traditional Photoshop editing and manual calculation methods:
| Method | Flexibility | Accuracy | Real-time Simulation | Consideration of Daylight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Photoshop Editing | Low | Low | No | No |
| Manual Calculation | Moderate | Moderate | No | Limited |
| Simulation Software (e.g., DIALux EVO) | High | High | Yes | Yes |
Utilizing appropriate lighting simulation software, such as DIALux EVO, significantly enhances the design process by accurately incorporating daylight and optimizing artificial lighting. This approach leads to energy-efficient buildings, reduced environmental impact, and lower operational costs. Lighting design software provides designers with the tools needed to create efficient, effective, and visually comfortable lighting solutions.
Role of Daylight and Usage of Suitable Software in Lighting Illumination Design. (2024, Feb 17). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/document/role-of-daylight-and-usage-of-suitable-software-in-lighting-illumination-design
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