Major technology advances are enabling smart lighting solutions and LED technology is linking lighting technology to the digital world. This brings a wide range of new challenges.

Developing truly smart lighting solutions based on an optimal balance

Building Lighting (BL) is the lighting research group of the Building Physics and Services (BPS) unit at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Research addresses daylight as well as artificial lighting, including both fundamental and applied research, and evolves around people as well as technology.  Human Centric Lighting, which refers to lighting systems with some kind of intelligent behavior aiming at enhancing the quality of the built environment for the users. Application domains include work environments, public outdoor spaces and private homes.

The optimal integral design of a building requires bridging gaps and exploring synergies between light and the other physical aspects related to buildings, as well as synergies between light and the non-physical aspects of buildings. This requires knowledge of all human related aspects of lighting as well as the physics of both daylight and artificial lighting. The group works closely within the Intelligent Lighting Institute and associated industrial partners.
Light is essential for human life and functioning. It influences people’s wellbeing in physiological, psychological and biological ways. As such, light is a key element in the design of our buildings and our built environment.
The research areas Building Lighting can be summarized as:

• Light & Energy
• Light & Environment
• Light & Health

Our goal is to help develop applications that optimally balance these three aspects of Human Centric Lighting.
Research covers a wide variety of interrelated topics:

• Visual and non-visual aspects of lighting in building design in general and on office workers and elderly people in particular
• Energy usage and sustainability
• Sustainable and energy efficient buildings in relation to visual and non-visual user demands
• Identifying and analyzing the parameters that lead to the creation of an optimally lit environment, and on the implementation of these parameters in the built environment
• Embedded sensors and actuators that communicate with their environment
• Analyzing collected data to optimize lighting system performance
• Implementation and exploitation of daylight as a design parameter
• Analyzing which light parameters determine whether a building is well or poorly designed