Christel de Bakker

• ir.
• PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology

Dynamic lighting is one of the new trends in lighting research; providing the right lighting level at the right time could possibly increase the alertness and performance of office workers. However, they might have preferences that deviate from this “healthy” lighting. Simultaneously, the building environment becomes increasingly automated, with oc...

Highly granular lighting control involves switching on and off luminaires based on individual occupancy. The resulting high frequency of lighting changes can distract the office workers and negatively impact their work performance. In a cubicle office, this might be less of an issue than in an office without partitions, as users do not have an over...

Highly granular lighting control reduces the energy consumption of shared office spaces by automatically controlling lighting at unoccupied desks. Typically, lighting is switched off, but this approach results in non-uniform illuminance distributions. In offices where individual work areas are often not separated by partitions and occupants oversee...

Occupancy-based lighting control strategies have been proven to be effective in diminishing offices’ energy consumption. These strategies have typically worked by controlling lighting at the room level but, recently, lighting systems have begun to be equipped with sensors on a more fine-grained level, enabling lighting control at the desk level. Fo...

The benefits of light in offices beyond enabling visual tasks have been demonstrated in former studies. Light positively influences outcome measures such as human's health, wellbeing, visual comfort, motivation, and environmental satisfaction. In order to measure the effects of light on the individual outcome measures, it is of high importance to c...

Occupancy-based lighting control can be applied at several resolution levels. To aid lighting designers in choosing the appropriate solution for a specific open-plan office case, this paper presents a simulation tool which enables calculating the lighting energy use for the different control strategies. By using a stochastic modelling approach and...

Lighting accounts for a significant amount of electrical energy consumption in office buildings, up to 45% of the total consumed. This energy consumption can be reduced by as much as 60% through an occupant-dependent lighting control strategy. With particular focus on open-plan offices, where the application of this strategy is more challenging to...

Controlling lighting conditions at desk level has proven its energy savings potential. However , in open-plan offices without partitions separating desks this local control might come at expense of users' comfort. An explorative study in an office building in the Netherlands revealed the influence of local control on users' satisfaction with the li...

Lighting tends to form a large part of the energy consumption in office buildings, which can be influenced by the use of sensors. Several sensor technologies have been developed throughout the years, like for example passive infrared systems. These are however limited in providing an understanding of occupants' behaviour as they often only measure...

Buildings have in recent years been the target of a number of energy efficiency improvement strategies given that they are a major energy end-use sector in most countries. Whilst new buildings due to legislations, increasingly address sustainability and improved energy efficiency considerations, the refurbishment process of older buildings still pr...

With the increase of building automation in the work environment, there is a risk that occupants lose their sense of control when decisions on environmental aspects such as temperature, electric lighting, and daylight are made by technology. This paper reports two experiments in which we investigated the effect of the level automation and the type...