Commercial Light Construction: Simulating Sunlight With LED Lighting

Increasing worker productivity through better office layout design is an ongoing effort. But one simple solution shouldn’t be overlooked: opening the curtains and letting the sunshine in. Exposure to sunlight increases alertness, thinking ability, and elevates the mood — all of which increase the productivity and happiness of the workforce. Therefore, designing work areas with plenty of windows and placing work desks near them is a good idea.

However, not all the rooms in a building are adjacent to an exterior wall, and sunlight isn’t available in poor weather. Rather than doing without sunlight, workers can enjoy the same benefits by using artificial lighting that closely simulates sunlight. LED lights can be manufactured to output any particular color or mixture of colors in the visible spectrum. This includes the full visible spectrum of sunlight.

White LED lighting comes close to duplicating sunlight with two exceptions. One is that it doesn’t include ultraviolet. UV does have one health benefit in that limited exposure times do cause vitamin D production in the skin. But it is otherwise harmful because of its skin and eye-damaging effects. This is one component that workers don’t need while doing their work.

The other exception is that although white LED light has similar energizing effects as sunlight, it still doesn’t look quite real. This is because the atmosphere alters the sunlight we receive on the ground. The blue light component in sunlight gets scattered about in the atmosphere and reaches our eyes from multiple directions as a result. This is why the sky literally glows blue.

This effect, called Rayleigh scattering, has been duplicated by placing a special coating on the LED light source. As a result, artificial skylights that look like the real thing are possible by using white LEDs with this special coating. With this innovation, even people working in the deepest of basements get all the benefits of sunlight regardless of the weather.

Contact us to learn how the right commercial light construction can enhance your business’s productivity.