Investigation on Illuminance Requirements and Associated Cost Saving Opportunities in Garment Factories

Abstract

Visual comfort is one of the major parameters that can be used to measure the human comfort in any environment. If the provided illuminance level in a working environment does not meet the workers visual comfort, it will lead to eye-strain, fatigue, headache, stress, accidents and finally, poor productivity. However, improvements in lighting do not necessarily mean that the workplace requires more light. Unnecessarily higher illuminance levels will also cause poor visual comfort and health risks. In addition, more power consumption on lighting will also result higher energy costs. Therefore, during this study, visual comfort and the work place illuminance requirement of workers in textile/apparel industry to perform different tasks (i.e. cutting, sewing and knitting) was studied. Accordingly, the optimum illuminance requirements depending upon the varied fabric colour and type were identified and finally, the energy saving potentials due to controlled illuminance level were also analysed.

‘Landolt Ring Experiment’ was used to study the visual performance of workers during the sewing operation and was revealed that around 36.3% of the workers would like to work if the illuminance level varies from 601 lx to 850 lx illuminance level and 45.9% of the workers do not happy to work if the illuminance level reduces less than 600 lx and greater than 850 lx. Moreover, more than 65% of the workers who do not satisfy with the existing illuminance levels of the production floors suggested that they have either headaches, eye diseases or both due to poor visual comfort. In addition, findings of the energy analysis revealed that the energy saving potential of 5%, 10%, 24%, 8% and 16% can be anticipated for fabric colours, red, blue, yellow, black and white respectively, when the 800 lx is the prevailing illuminance level for sewing operation.