April 3, 2009 By Blake Harris Using natural light to illuminate
building interiors is a concept as old as the window itself. But
with recent advances in lighting research and technology along
with growing awareness of the vital need to reduce the carbon
footprint of energy consumption, there are new horizons for
daylighting. "Daylighting also represents the single largest
'new' opportunity for energy savings in commercial lighting
today and for the foreseeable future," explained Dale Brentrup,
professor of architecture at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte. Instead of just relying on a few windows or
skylights, cutting-edge daylighting is shaped and delivered by
the architecture itself. This is where the School of
Architecture's Daylighting and Energy Performance Laboratory
comes in. Equipped with a "sun machine" and "sky machine,"
graduate students and faculty crunch numbers to determine which
designs work best. The two instruments are used to assess the
impact of sky luminance and solar radiation