Control systems can be controlled manually or automatically. When talking specifically about artificial lighting, a lighting control system can be described as a group of components that allows you to control the output of an artificial lighting system.
Wired lighting control systems have evolved through the time, since the beginning of the invention of electricity and the light bulb. Most of the lighting till today is simply switched on or off (mostly remotely), without any dimming function.
The evolution of lighting sources toward LEDs is often called ‘Ledification’. Lighting control allow to reduce further the consumption of electricity for lighting. But most important, to adjust lighting to needs of occupants. Figure 14. Luminous efficacy of different types of light sources anno 2019.
Control systems generally consist of 3 major components: input, control process and output. In an automatic lighting control systems, one or more sensors perform a certain ‘observation’ (e.g. detection of movement, measurement of amount of entering light, ...) and convert the measurements into a signal that can be passed on to the controller.
Nowadays, LED lighting is the standard, as it is can provide very qualitative light in a very energy efficient way. Finally, lighting control systems can contribute to limiting the use of the artificial lighting (in time, in active power (dimming), ...).
The most common control strategy is the rudimentary clock function, which just open the shading devices on specific times the day or solar positions of the day (e.g. in residential application, it opens when the sun rises and closes two hours later than).
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