Recent research on anidolic daylighting systems: Highly reflective coating materials and chronobiological properties

Abstract

Making daylight more available in buildings is highly desirable for reasons of energy efficiency, visual comfort, occupant well-being and health. The Anidolic Integrated Ceiling (AIC) is a highly efficient daylighting system, designed to gather and redirect daylight from the outside of a building into its interior with minimal losses. The reflective coating materials used within AICs have a major impact on the optical efficiency of such systems. The first part of our article presents a new computer model of an AIC consisting of more than 30 distinct components. We discuss on which of them the use of expensive, highly reflective coatings makes the most sense. We conclude that coating the component "Anidolic element 1" is always a good choice and that considerable financial savings can be obtained by following an appropriate optimization sequence.The second part of our article discusses chronobiological properties of Anidolic Daylighting Systems (ADS). We recorded daytime irradiance values for several weeks from March to May 2009 in an experimental office setup in our laboratory using a portable digital spectroradiometer. Our results showed to which extent different sky conditions influenced daylight exposure of office workers in an ADS-equipped office room. We conclude that for the tested ADS-equipped office room, daylight supply can be considered largely sufficient during long periods on most working days. However, complementary artificial lighting with blue-enriched polychromatic fluorescent tubes might be useful on days with predominantly overcast skies as well as before 09:00 and after 16:30 on all days. © 2009 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.