SunTracker Technologies (Victoria, CA) introduces full spectrum lighting simulation capabilities to its flagship Cerise 365™ horticultural and architectural lighting design and analysis software.
Commercial lighting design and analysis software represents light as having three components: red, green, and blue. This is sufficient for photometric lighting calculations and architectural visualizations, but it fails to represent the spectral power distribution of light as seen by an observer or measured with a spectroradiometer.
The spectral power distribution (SPD) is of critical importance when performing spectral calculations for horticultural lighting and melanopic calculations for human-centric lighting. It is not enough to know the spectral power distribution of a single light source – the light we see or measure is reflected from colored surfaces and transmitted by tinted glass. Moreover, there are often multiple light sources with different SPDs, including direct sunlight and diffuse daylight, that must be considered.
Some research lighting design software has addressed this problem by dividing the spectrum into as many as 80 color bands, but it still needs to know the spectral reflectance and transmittance properties of every material in the environment, information that is rarely available for lighting designers.
SunTracker Technologies’ Cerise 365 software addresses this problem with technology that requires no increase in computer time or memory, and with nothing more than the spectral power distributions of the electric light sources. The spectrum can be calculated in real time as the user interactively tours the environment.
Offering full support for climate-based annual daylight and electric lighting design, Cerise 365 is available for licensing as an OEM product. For more information, contact [email protected].
