Abstract
The importance of accurate lighting has been proven to be essential for good performance in all kinds of buildings, where most of the professional activities are carried out. National regulations and international standards dealing with indoor lighting establish the technical requirements of lighting installations to ensure the performance of their users. These requirements deal with illuminance on the working plane, uniformity, glare, color temperature of light and some other parameters. However, regulations and technical documents on indoor lighting are mainly referred to standard conditions that are sometimes far away from the reality. Hence, some installations can fulfill the technical requirements, whilst being uncomfortable for task development, impairing user’s performance and are oversized in terms of energy consumption. This work departs from a field study in highlighting the regulatory limitations in the matter of reflectance, to propose a quasi-Lambertian approach to real conditions in indoor workplaces with a special aim in educative environments. It consists of the introduction of “effective reflectance” coefficients for some key visual tasks and furniture carried out by users in certain typical positions and working planes. Based on this coefficient, it is proposed to implement a simple measurement and luminary programming methodology adapted to each particular workplace, especially in educational centers. The final target is to improve visual performance and save energy.
Highlights
Indoor activities include a wide variety that goes from industrial production to education, or from medicine and surgery to leisure and entertainment
The luminance and the deviations depending on the measurement angle in real and ideal conditions have been considered as an indicator of the accuracy of Lambertian approach
The variability of the visual conditions is much higher when installation users are near to the visual task because they influence, mainly by shadowing, the light distribution on the working plane
Summary
Indoor activities include a wide variety that goes from industrial production to education, or from medicine and surgery to leisure and entertainment. Inside this vast amount of activities, there are habitual ones such as office work, teaching, cooking and many others. 80% of the information we receive in our daily lives comes from the sense of vision [1]. This makes an idea about how critical an accurate lighting installation can be for task performance, safety at work, productivity, well-being and even disease avoidance. In spite of the positive impact of accurate indoor lighting on performance and productivity [2], users’ health [3,4] and others [5] at any range of age [6,7], indoor lighting requires high consumptions in energy, raw materials (manufacture of luminaries, wiring and electrical devices), and causes emissions of greenhouse gasses, solid waste needing recycling, etc. [8]
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