Connected lighting management in action at “Nobel Prize Factory”

A connected Delmatic lighting management system in operation at the world-leading Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) demonstrates the positive impact of connected lighting management on a building’s operational effectiveness and energy-efficiency.

LMB Is one of the most prestigious multidisciplinary laboratory and research centres in the world, and is the birthplace of modern molecular biology. Scientists working at the LMB have pioneered many innovative techniques, including DNA sequencing, and won nine Nobel prizes, dozens of Royal Society awards and numerous other scientific honours.

The £200 million, purpose-built building is the result of a collaborative effort by architects, scientists and engineers to provide a supportive and sustainable environment for medical research and collaboration.   The LMB is unique in housing the complete cycle of scientific investigation, teaching, development and commercialisation in one location.

A Total Solution 

The 32,000 sq.m multi-functional complex, houses everything from biotechnology research laboratories, a magnetic resonance research centre, clean rooms and process labs to teaching areas and administrative offices - all of which require very different lighting and environmental conditions. 

The highly flexible Delmatic system helps provide the most suitable working environment required in every area of facility, whether it be a specialist research laboratory or public meeting room, while, at the same time, ensuring maximum energy efficiency.

Wherever they are in the facility, occupants can use the local control facilities provided by the Delmatic system to adjust lighting to suit their task or individual preference, while presence detectors, absence detectors and scheduled off-sweeps (with dimming warning sequences) ensure that when there’s nobody in a particular room, lab or area, the lights, heating and other energy-consuming services go off.   

Flexible, Optimised Control

The Delmatic DALI lighting management system controls and manages lighting throughout the project, providing individual Dali addressable switching, dimming and monitoring of some 14,000 Dali luminaires.   In addition, the system supports testing and monitoring of some 3,500 Dali emergency fittings equipped with Em-Pro ballasts. 

The high level of addressability within the system has enabled the designers to establish control parameters that best suit the design and usage of each area.  The dimming function enables illuminance levels to be adjusted to suit activities conducted within specific areas.   The result is a highly flexible system that can be easily adjusted as function or requirements change within different areas of the building. 

The Delmatic system is fully software-configurable via graphical head-end software.  A number of operating scenarios have been set up to optimise building efficiency and suit the convenience and comfort of occupants as well as incorporating custom features and configuration such as special lighting levels, composite scenes and control scenarios.  

The Delmatic system provides extensive real time monitoring of the installation including individual lamp failure, ballast failure and emergency monitoring failure of every luminaire in the building including lighting in plant areas and basement link tunnels. The system incorporates powerful scene set dimming within seminar rooms and lecture theatres and is fully software-configurable via graphical head-end software.

Technology

LMB is committed to achieving a substantial reduction in carbon emissions and the building is designed to optimise energy efficiency through a number of means including renewable energy for heating and cooling , blinds that minimise heat build-up and, of course, the Delmatic connected lighting management system which reduces light intensity when daylight is available and relates lighting and HVAC to occupancy.  

The Delmatic system incorporates Dali presence detectors and Dali multisensors which provide absence detection and daylight linking to maximise energy efficiency.  To optimise building energy efficiency, Delmatic presence detectors pass on information relating to occupancy of individual areas to the building Building Management System (BMS) to ensure that heating/cooling as well as lighting is linked to out-of-hours occupancy and only used where required.

The Delmatic Dali modules, luminaires and sensors are connected via a Wieland modular wiring distribution network. The modular Delmatic hardware hosts full distributed-intelligence functionality: this feature, coupled with the plug-in connectivity of the network modular wiring, proved beneficial for the initial installation and will assist in rapid plug-and-play maintenance which is critical in a world-class laboratory environment.

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