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Daylight , Indoor Illumination , and Human Behavior

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Sustainable Built Environments

Definition of the Subject

Daylight in buildings is the natural illumination experienced by the occupants of any man-made construction with openings to the outside, e.g., dwelling and workplace. The quantity and quality of daylight in buildings is continually varying due to the natural changes in sun and sky conditions from one moment to the next. These changes have components that are random (e.g., individual cloud formations), daily (i.e., progression from day to night), and seasonal (e.g., changing day length and prevailing weather patterns). For any given sky and sun condition the quantity and character of daylight in a space will depend on the size, orientation, and nature of the building apertures; the shape and aspect of the building and its surroundings; and the optical (i.e., reflective and transmissive) properties of all the surfaces comprising the building and its...

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Abbreviations

BTDF:

The bidirectional transmission distribution function. The BTDF characterizes the distribution in luminous output across the full hemisphere of transmitted rays and usually needs to be determined for every incident direction. It is needed to simulate the performance of complex glazing materials and systems.

Climate-based daylight modeling:

The prediction of various radiant or luminous quantities (e.g., irradiance, illuminance, radiance, and luminance) using sun and sky conditions that are derived from standardized annual meteorological datasets.

Daylight:

The totality of visible radiation originating from both the sun and the sky.

Daylight factor:

The ratio of internal illuminance to unobstructed external illuminance under the CIE standard overcast sky.

Daylight metric:

Some mathematical combination of (potentially disparate) measurements and/or dimensions and/or conditions of daylight represented on a continuous scale.

Illuminance:

The total luminous flux incident on a surface per unit area. It is a measure of the intensity of the incident light, wavelength-weighted by the eye’s sensitivity to correlate with human brightness perception. SI unit: lux or lumens per square meter.

Luminance:

Photometric measure of the luminous intensity per unit area of light traveling in a given direction. It describes the amount of light that passes through or is emitted from a particular area, and falls within a given solid angle. The SI unit for luminance is candela per square meter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, UK

    Dr. John Mardaljevic

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  1. Dr. John Mardaljevic
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Correspondence to John Mardaljevic .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Vivian Loftness

  2. Department of Geography Humboldt University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Dagmar Haase

  3. Department of Computational Landscape Ecology, Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

    Dagmar Haase

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Mardaljevic, J. (2013). Daylight , Indoor Illumination , and Human Behavior. In: Loftness, V., Haase, D. (eds) Sustainable Built Environments. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5828-9_456

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