VELUX’s Jens Christoffersen and Nicolas Roy explore the importance of daylight research and the Daylight Visualizer tool

VELUX is best known for bringing light to life through its innovative products and solutions. With that comes a team of dedicated daylight experts – known as the Daylight, Energy and Indoor Climate Knowledge Centre – which are very much at the heart of the VELUX brand. It is their combined experience and knowledge, together with over 80 years of research and development in this field, that has driven the importance of daylight to buildings and their occupants at the VELUX Group.

A well-known figurehead in the world of daylight, Jens Christoffersen, Senior Researcher at the VELUX Group, has made significant contributions throughout his ten years of working for the business. His role as part of the Daylight, Energy and Indoor Climate Knowledge Centre, together with his colleagues, is to undertake research to drive knowledge and competence in the areas of daylight, energy, and indoor climates – relating this to the effects of VELUX daylighting solutions in buildings.

Jens Christoffersen, Senior Researcher at the VELUX Group

This research helps to shape the knowledge of the internal teams at VELUX Group, while further developing specific documentation and information within the fields of daylighting, ventilation, indoor air quality, energy use and thermal comfort that can then be offered to designers, specifiers and installers. The research team and its long-term expertise ultimately drives the development of new solutions to improve daylighting and the experience of building occupants.

The importance of daylight and air quality within commercial buildings cannot be overstated. Not only can natural light replace electric lighting during the daytime and reduce energy use for lighting, it also influences both heating and cooling loads, which make it an important parameter of an energy-efficient design. Additionally, recent research has proved that daylight provides an array of health and comfort benefits that make it essential for building occupants.

Christoffersen and his colleagues at VELUX understand how crucial daylight modelling and the use of simulation tools can be to maximise daylight within commercial buildings. This in turn improves the health of occupants and benefits the holistic design of the building. “Daylighting simulation tools make it possible to evaluate the quantity and distribution of daylight in a room, while considering key parameters, such as window placement, building geometry, external obstruction, interior divisions and material properties. These tools enable designers and architects to better design their projects, to understand how daylight is distributed within a building, and to make the most of the abundance of natural light to benefit the building’s energy usage and more crucially the health of its users”, explains Christoffersen.

The VELUX Daylight Visualizer tool
Working closely with Jens as part of the Daylight, Energy and Indoor Climate team, architect Nicolas Roy specialises in the field of building performance simulations, with a focus on daylighting. Over the past 15 years Roy’s extensive knowledge of building design, 3D modelling and lighting has helped to shape the development of one of VELUX Commercial’s most useful daylighting tools for architects: the VELUX Daylight Visualizer.

Architect Nicolas Roy works closely with VELUX’s Daylight, Energy and Indoor Climate team

This free to use simulation tool helps architects in predicting and documenting daylight levels, as well as the appearance of a space prior to realisation of the building design. The Daylight Visualizer goes above and beyond the more commonly used 3D visualisation programs by accurately simulating and quantifying daylight levels in interiors.

The Daylight Visualizer can:
• Calculate daylight factor levels
• Evaluate requirements for daylight provisions in the new European Standard for Daylight in Buildings – EN 17037
• Create or import 3D models
• Perform luminance and illuminance simulations under different CIE sky conditions

The daylight factor (DF) is a commonly used performance indicator for the evaluation of daylight provision in buildings. It is a measure of the amount of diffuse light available at different points inside the building in relation to the amount of diffuse light available outside the building under unobstructed overcast sky conditions.

More importantly, the daylight factor simulations can be used to evaluate requirements for daylight provisions in EN 17037 – another area where the Daylight, Energy and Indoor Climate team has extensive knowledge, some of which has been shared in our guide to EN 17037 here.

Contact Details
Learn more about the Daylight Visualizer Tool and how it supports EN 17037 from Nicolas Roy at VELUX by clicking the link.