Adaptive lighting comfort in the classrooms of educational building and student hostel rooms

Abstract

The comfort level of occupants inside a building depends on various indoor environment factors like thermal comfort, indoor air quality, and indoor lighting quality. According to studies done on indoor environment quality of buildings, lighting plays a very critical role in determining the occupants comfort level. A proper indoor lighting is very important especially in the classrooms of an educational building as well as in student hostel rooms as it can be said as a vital element, controlling the psychology and comfort of the students and hence a deciding factor in the teaching-learning process. The lighting intensity and its distribution depends on the location of the interior partition as well as the design strategy of the exterior envelop. So, in order to obtain the most occupant friendly results, the impact of various strategies adopted should be evaluated in the early design period itself. This paper adopts a questionnaire-based field surveys which is done in the classrooms of National Institute of Technology Warangal and also in the hostel rooms of 1.8K Ultra Mega hostel of this institute. The main objective of this study includes. 1) To assess the indoor lighting comfort in the classrooms and hostel rooms of National Institute of Technology Warangal through a questionnaire-based lighting comfort study. 2) To identify preferences of subjects in the classroom environment with respect to lighting comfort and 3) To identify the comfort range of lighting intensity inside the classrooms and hostel rooms. SPSS software is used analyse the reliability of survey responses by finding the P value.