The impact of room surface reflectance on corneal illuminance and rule-of-thumb equations for circadian lighting design

Recently, corneal illuminance attracts much attention because it is closely related to important functions of indoor lighting. Especially, applying circadian light in the built environment places a challenging requirement on indirect corneal illuminance. In this work, rule-of-thumb equations are proposed to guide circadian lighting design: (i) for artificial lighting, Ecor,avg (i) = (Φ/C1) · ρ/(1−ρ′), where Ecor,avg (i) is the average indirect corneal illuminance at standing or sitting positions, Φ is the initial flux from luminaires, C1 is a constant comparable to the total room surface area, ρ is the reflectance of the surface where the first reflection occurs, and ρ′ is the area-weighted average of surface reflectance; and (ii) for daylighting, Ecor,avg (i) = C2 · WWR · ρ/(1−ρ′), where C2 is a constant, and WWR represents the window-to-wall ratio.