Can new technology reduce use of electricity and improve daylight in pig houses?

The application aims to build technical know-how on a new design for better use of natural daylight and its usefulness in animal houses and related facilities. The work will result in recommendations for the use of natural light to reduce the energy consumption of artificial indoor lighting and find a lighting solution that is profitable in the short term, that is 4-5 years.

In the project daylight system from Solatube ® (North America) and Velux (Nordic producers) are being studied to assess how they could supplement and, in some cases replace artificial lighting in animal housing.

The objective of the study is to determine how well these daylight systems can function in the practical operation of an animal stall with an environment that results in both dusty and dirty equipment. Received daylight exchange in the current animal department is measured and compared to the expected calculated using the lighting design tools DiaLux and Rayfront.

The research project is funded by the Swedish Energy Agency and will be carried out in collaboration between department of Rural Buildings, Swedish university of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Alnarp and the department of Energi and Building Design (EDB), University of Lund (LU).

Responsible person for the project: Hans von Wachenfelt

Participants in the project: Torsten Hörndahl, SLU, Alnarp; Niko Gentile, Jiangtao Du och Marie-Claude Dubois EDB; LU.

Project start date: 2013-01-01
Project finish date: 2014-12-31

Publications

von Wachenfelt, H, Vakouli, V., Pacheco Diéguez’, A., Gentile, N., Dubois, M-C., Jeppsson, K-H. (2015). Lighting energy saving with light pipe in farm animal production. Journal of Daylighting 2, 21-31.

Pacheco Diegez, A. 2014. Light Pipes. Forward raytracing as a predictive tool and key design parameters . Master thesis at the inst. of Energy and Building Design, faculty of Engineering, LTH, Lund.