Year
1989
Abstract
For years the lighting industry has manually entered and manually performed calculations on the photometric data that is necessary for lighting designs. In the past few years many lighting manufacturers and private lighting design software companies have published computer programs to enter and perform these calculations. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and other interested organizations, are involved in outdoor lighting designs for Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) that require lighting design software programs. During the period when no commercial lighting design software programs existed, SNL first used a government agency's program and then developed an in-house program. The in-house program is very powerful but has limitations, so it is not feasible to distribute it to interested organizations . This program has been used extensively for many high security outdoor lighting design projects. There is still a demand for lighting design programs, so SNL has ordered several that are commercially available. These programs are being evaluated for two reasons: (1) to determine if their features are adequate to aid the user in lighting designs, and (2) to provide that information to SNL and other organizations. The information obtained in this paper is to be used to help an end user decide if a program is needed, and if so, to choose one. This paper presents the results of evaluations performed.