Luminaire Design

This design project was part of the course— Advanced Topics in Daylight and Electrical Lighting. The objective was to design a luminaire from a choice of four lamp types to create a specific lighting effect, distribution type or lighting quality. We choose to use a combination of two different lamp types—PAR reflector and LED strips—to design a colour themed mood lighting.

A PAR is a spotlight with a 12 degree focus angle, whereas the LED strip is a diffused light source. While the LED strip can take any shape and light up in different colours in the RGB mode, the PAR is rigid and has a colour temperature of 2700K. Hence both the luminaires are contrasting in their form, the nature of the light they emit and their colour temperatures. We utilised the contrasting nature of both to combine them. With PAR as a focused spotlight on a single plane (in our case the horizontal plane), we used a ring geometry to wrap the LED strip along its periphery for diffused light on the surrounding vertical planes. This reduces the stark contrast that would have been created by having just the PAR.

To iterate our concept and evaluate distribution of light we used HDR photographs for quick analysis and simulated the luminaire for detailed analysis, generating luminous intensity distribution plots.