UC Berkeley

The smart lighting control system requires data of the indoor daylight to optimize the daylight utilization to reduce electrical energy consumption of lighting and simultaneously increase occupants’ comfort level and healthfulness. However, existing daylight sensing systems are often inaccurate or easily interfere with occupants’ activities. We put forward an indoor daylight sensing system based on the “one-phase” Hardware-in-the Loop (HiL) Simulation. The core of this new HiL system is a new luminance distribution sensor (referred to as Parallel Luminance Sensor, PLS) which can measure the emitted luminance distribution of the building fenestration in multiple directions simultaneously (i.e., in parallel). The PLS is designed to measure the luminance distribution in 145 discrete patches based on the Klems basis. The PLS has a dynamic range of 23 bit and a sampling rate of 10 Hz. Several laboratory and field deployments demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed and designed PLS-enabled HiL system for daylight harvesting and/or artificial light control to reduce the energy consumption. The test results showed that the system is able to estimate the daylight illuminance of a large area with only one single sensor with good accuracy. Besides, the system can generate luminance maps to be used for evaluating the visual comfort and/orglare. The aspects for improvement are also identified from the test results. The cost-benefit analysis shows that the new system can reduce the number of sensors installed and achieve savings in commissioning cost while reducing the interference between the occupants and the sensor system. The future plan towards the improvement of the new system and its real-world applications is discussed.