Orion Engineering Corporation’s  "Adaptive Daylighting Control System" research program proved the feasibility of distributed daylighting control as an alternative to today’s single sensor control technology. This program resulted in the successful demonstration of distributed daylighting control system, as well as our ability to determine discrete occupancy patterns out of collected data, using a low cost-effective distributed sensing system.

Electric lighting accounts for over 15% of the energy consumed by offices and retail space; in fact, this number can exceed 50% of the total building energy consumption. Electric lighting can also generate an additional thermal load that must be removed by the building cooling system, further increasing these percentages. A typical modern office building uses about 4 kWh/ft² per year for lighting and 0.7 additional kWh/ft² per year for air conditioning to remove the heat produced by the lighting.

Current sensor deployment scheme for daylighting control

Our system departs from the static single control point to a distributed array that can readily compensate for changes in the spatial quality of the daylight input. Using the hub concept below, it is possible to produce a single unit to perform these control tasks over a wide variety of lighting conditions.

Orion's distributed sensor deployment scheme