Mike White

COVID-19 has caused a considerable proportion of the public to work from home, either part- or full-time, in unregulated domestic conditions, which have not been designed for commercial activities. This study determined what existing lighting conditions were present in a selection of work-from-home (WFH) environments (Objective One) through quantitative lux level and equivalent melanopic lux (EML) readings by evaluating them against regulatory standards, where further study is required to validate the results with a larger dataset. This study also investigated the social demand for human-centric lighting (HCL) installations within WFH environments (Objective Two) through qualitative questionnaires by considering key parameters: sustainability, practicality, and cost. The results of Objective One showed that compliance with general safety lighting requirements was achieved by 80% of the installations. The mean lux level recorded was 452.4 lux and 0.729 uniformity, which fell below commercial requirements defined for commonly performed WFH activities; 34.3% of recorded EML dropped below the regulatory requirements under daylight conditions. When isolated to artificial lighting, only 7.5% of the required EML was achieved. The results of Objective Two showed that generally participants did not feel that their WFH installations were unsuitably lit, however, 46.2% of participants identified noticeable headaches or eye strain when working from home. A total of 80% of participants highlighted that HCL task lighting would be preferable. It was also found that participants were willing to invest in circadian lighting for health, where 63.2% of them would not accept a reduction in efficiency of over 10% compared to non HCL. Wellbeing was found to be participants’ key preference for their lighting systems, followed by efficiency, home impact, and cost.

Research studies previously performed using a singular climate had shown that certain solar shading devices have the potential for energy savings for buildings. In this paper, a commercial building was studied using the DesignBuilder programme to identify the solar performance of the building. The model represented a typical commercial building with standard properties. This study allowed for comparison for horizontal louvre, overhang and vertical shading types in various climates (Florida, Cairo, Leeds and Reykjavik) for a year presented in terms of monthly energy demand. Comparative analysis identified that the horizontal louvre type, which consisted of 5-louvre with 400 mm spacing between the adjacent louvres, performed best to reduce the annual energy usage for Florida (4191 kWh), Cairo (5194 kWh), Leeds (1882 kWh) and Reykjavik (957 kWh). In general, all environments showed increases through heating and lighting, but proportionally cooling reduction was higher annually.

Over the course of industrial manufacturing, additional heat within the extract systems is usually released into the atmosphere and its intrinsic energy is wasted. This paper investigated a cold abatement smoke extract system for a fire testing wall furnace to determine the viability in recovering heat from the hot smoke. Three scenarios were investigated: 1) the extract system was closed and only 300°C smoke was present; 2) the system took in ambient air around the furnace and heat recovery occurred at 80°C in smoky air; 3) the smoke had been removed from the air and the temperature was 60°C. It was found that there was a significant build-up of soot on Scenarios 1 & 2 with a build-up rate of 0.25 μm/s which totalled 2.7 mm of soot after a three-hour test. The soot had a low heat transfer rate and therefore acted as an insulator on the heat exchanger which reduced the efficiency significantly of it over time. Due to this loss in efficiency, it was more viable to recover heat in Scenario 3 at 60°C in clean air than it was to recover heat at 300°C or 80°C in smoky air. The results show that having clean air was more important than a higher temperature when it came from recovering heat from a cold abatement system for a fire testing furnace. This paper contributes to reveal the possibilities of harnessing the “waste heat” for use in other applications in the vicinity of the manufacturing processes, such as heating water within a central heating plant, domestic hot water or electricity generation, or re-cycled within the industrial plant itself.