Energy efficient lighting through photorealistic visualization
Our buildings are designed with both daylight and artificial light, but while daylight is an integrated part of the architect's artistic process, the artificial lighting is mostly left as a technical task for the lighting engineers. The project aims to provide architects and lighting designers the opportunity to evaluate, and compare innovative, energy efficient lighting solutions through high-end photorealistic visualizations.
Artificial lighting and energy are not topics that easily will catch the Danish architects' interest. Nevertheless, the architects' influence on energy-saving, functional and aesthetic lighting can be tremendous. This project aims to generate interest, knowledge and tools for efficient visualization of lighting solutions. Energy demand in a light installation depends not only on the chosen luminaires, but also of lighting scenarios, which must be tailored to user needs and support the building design. LED fixtures are becoming more and more popular in indoor lighting, and provide new opportunities for precise lighting control, dimming and tuning of the colour temperature. Unfortunately, the new technology often leads to unforeseen problems, e.g. in the form of glare, because the new light sources are used in new ways and have light distributions that cannot be simulated in the traditional lighting software. It is therefore important to use tools that give credible evidence that energy efficient lighting solutions and user comfort can go hand in hand. This project aims to visualize lighting environments at very high level, and provide demo environments available to all players in the Danish market.
Thus, the project includes the whole chain:
• The modeling of very detailed example environments, combined with various light settings
• Output as energy budget
• Visual output of unique screens that allow stakeholders a very realistic lighting experience for example comparison of light distribution and glare problems and interaction with the colours of the space
Examples widely in the industry as inspiration for the use of visualizing the best possible lighting environment incl. energy conditions.
Various ways to light buildings (with electric lighting) have been investigated, with a double objective: reducing electric power density and improving user satisfaction. The selected approach was the projection of photorealistic images of indoor spaces to panels of observers. For each configuration, the exact electric power consumption of the lighting installation was calculated. The panel of observers were asked to compare lighting scenes one to one and to express their preferences, leading to the classification of the perceived quality of lighting installation.
The participants proposed various ways to reduce energy consumption of artificial lighting and simultaneously increase user satisfaction. Most of them dealt with adding a small complement of light on specific surfaces in a way that largely compensates for a reduction of the power to general lighting. In this case, the number of light sources tends to increase, but global electric power used for general lighting decreases most of the time.
Key figures
Category
Participants
| Partner | Subsidy | Auto financing |
|---|---|---|
| Rambøll | ||
| HENNING LARSEN ARCHITECTS A/S | ||
| Dansk Center for Lys |
