Emergency Lighting Spacing Tables (and How To Make Them)
If the luminaires you produce or are considering using are to be applied as emergency luminaires you will need to calculate the spacing table for emergency situations, along escape routes and in open anti-panic areas.
PhotoView will calculate the data and table in a few seconds, and the table will be available as text in the Windows clipboard, or you can save it as a file.
All I had to do to get the data above is drag a photometry file (.IES, .LDT etc.) into PhotoView.
The image above shows quite a lot of data, let's zoom into the table itself:
In the above example the following emergency lighting requirements have been met (except in the RED cells):
Given these conditions the program creates the table at the mounting heights shown. You can change the mounting heights by clicking on one of the cells in the height column (to the left of the spacing table).
The "Lux Below" column gives you the lux directly below the luminaire at the given height.
You can see the A and B spacing is along a corridor, and the program has given a B spacing of 10.5m, at 1.65m height (the first data row in the spacing table shown above). The uniformity for this luminaire is more than 40 at 1.65 in a corridor and also in a room. Hence the two red cells.
The luminaire in the example above is clearly not designed for emergency spacing (the lux is far too high) but it does illustrate how the program highlights problems by coloring cells red when the emergency conditions are not met.
In the table below we can see a luminaire better suited for emergency situations. Only at a height of more than 7 meters is the minimum lux condition not met, and at 5 meters height or less all the conditions for corridors and rooms are met.
Here is a clearer view of what the spacings mean in the tables:
If you need
a quick and simple introduction (or refresher!) to lighting terms and
calculations try the book "Candelas
Lumens and Lux":