Analysis of Photopic and Melanopic Lighting in Teaching Environments

Abstract

Daylight and lighting seem to be a key tool for people’s well-being, however, there are no specific and agreed recommendations that address both photopic and melanopic aspects in educational environments. The present work analyzed melanopic light in four teaching environments considering photopic indoor lighting, daylight depending on the window orientation, location of the observer in the room, and their line of view. The façade direction, daylight at 11.00 a.m. for six months from October to March, and the characteristics of each classroom, such as reflectance of the surfaces, location of the luminaires and their spectral and spatial power distributions, or calculation points affecting the melanopic light reaching the corneal vertical plane of a hypothetical control observer were studied. For this evaluation, classrooms were experimentally treated and simulated using DialuxEvo software, and the computer-generated values resembled the experimental values. Once the study was performed, an improvement proposal, based on LED lighting, was made to optimize the classroom lighting considering the melanopic requirements, which we ensured that users who passed through these classrooms had an adequate amount light at any time of the day. Our results simplify to the greatest lighting projects and enable designers to carry out optimized evaluations of specific environments from both the photometric and circadian perspectives.