In response to environmental concerns, demands for improved energy efficiency and a desire to create a more pleasant working environment; building designers are looking for ways to make better use of natural light. However, whilst natural light is both free and non-polluting, it can also produce high levels of visual contrast and glare, and unwanted heat. Most current design techniques estimate the natural internal illumination that results from an overcast sky; they do not include the contribution by direct sunlight entering the space, which is often the source of unwanted characteristics. Whilst a sophisticated computer ray-tracing program (RADIANCE) exists that can predict the full range of natural illumination, each prediction can take several minutes (or longer) to calculate. The time required to examine how a natural lighting design behaves over a typical year can therefore be prohibitive. Techniques for estimating the illumination provided by artificial lights also predict illumination under static conditions. Current techniques are therefore unsuitable for examining the dynamic behaviour of a lighting design, which links the automatic control of artificial lights to the changing levels of natural light. The aim of this research was to develop a computer based lighting design tool that overcomes these limitations. Based on the calculation of lighting coefficients, the numeric relationship between the luminance of light sources and the illuminance they produce, the Dynamic Lighting System (DLS) is able to calculate time-varying illuminance from a combination of natural light and artificial lights controlled by a lighting control system. The DLS has been written using the platform independent programming language Java. It is therefore able to run unaltered on most computer platforms, although in practice is limited to platforms on which the ray-tracing program RADIANCE will run, as RADIANCE is used to calculate coefficients. The DLS has been tested by comparing predicted levels of illuminance with levels measured in a test room under real sky conditions. These comparisons showed a high degree of correlation, but with a few large discrepancies. Possible causes of these discrepancies are offered and suggestions made about how they might be eliminated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:391737 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Cropper, Paul |
| Publisher | De Montfort University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/2086/4215 |
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