Speaker
Description
The awareness about the non-visual effects of lighting plays an important role in all building types, both residential and non-residential, and a new term, ‘integrative light’, was introduced within the CIE to combine the photopic and melanopic effects on the health and comfort of the occupants of indoor spaces. Integrative lighting is particularly crucial in educational buildings, as it strongly affects the learning process along with physiological growing of young pupils in lower education levels. Regarding the Italian context, the educational building sector has become particularly strategic in terms of architecture interventions over the last decade, through increasing funds for optimizing the building energy performance, as well as the comfort and health conditions for teachers and students.
In this frame, results from a study carried out for classrooms of different educational buildings (from middle schools to universities) are presented. The analyzed classrooms presented different architectural characteristics (in terms of orientation, size, window area, color of internal surfaces, obstructing setting with different geometry and color) and types of lighting systems (fluorescent and LEDs).
The study relied on a combination of two approaches: (i) on the one hand, simulations were run, with the objective of analyzing the dynamic variation of photopic and melanopic quantities during the course of a year; (ii) on the other hand, field measurements were taken using calibrated instruments for the purpose, such as the spectro-photometer BTS256-EF manufactured by Gigahertz, with the objective of verifying visual and non-visual conditions in real spaces and to collect data to calibrate the simulation models. Simulations and measures were repeated for different lighting conditions: electric light only, daylight only (in the presence of a clear sky and of an overcast sky), and a combination of both. Different times of the day were chosen to take measurements, in the afternoon and in the morning, so as to account for the different spectral distribution of daylight. The simulation tool ALFA-for-Rhino was used for the purpose, by implementing the spectral reflectance properties of the materials used in the classroom, measured through the Minolta CM600d contact spectro-photometer.
The research was conducted with two main objectives: (i) on the one hand, to assess the influence on integrative lighting (photopic and circadian illuminances) played by architectural and photometric features of the classrooms (orientation, WWR, surface colors, obstruction; lighting systems); (ii) on the other hand, to verify if the circadian values (m-EDI) calculated or measured in the classrooms could meet the reference values that have been prescribed in recent literature, for instance in the WELL protocol or within the second expert symposium organized by the CIE in Manchester.
The method adopted for the study the results that were obtained are described in detail and critically discussed.
| Keyword 1 | integrative lighting |
|---|---|
| Keyword 2 | lighting in classroom |
| Keyword 3 | ALFA simulations |
| Keyword 4 | non-visual lighting |
| Keyword 5 | circadian measures |
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