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Coopersburg, Pa. — May 5, 2015 — Lutron Electronics, the leader in energy-saving wireless lighting and shade control, unveiled its Performance Shading Program. It is a comprehensive program that helps architects and designers select the right shading fabric for their building designs based on daylight, glare, view, and aesthetics.
Harnessing more than five years of groundbreaking research with Purdue University, Lutron’s innovative program is expected to change the way shades and fabrics are specified in commercial spaces by helping customers see shading as not only an aesthetic choice, but also one that is integral to overall building performance.
Today, most professionals specify shading fabrics on aesthetics (color and texture) alone. Lutron’s research shows, however, that proper fabric selection is a key element to creating a glare-free space with optimized daylight autonomy and optimal occupant comfort.
In 2010, Lutron teamed up with Purdue University’s world-renowned Herrick Laboratories and Dr. Thanos Tzempelikos, assistant professor of civil engineering and mechanical engineering at Purdue, to understand the relationship between automated shading solutions and energy savings in a typical commercial environment.
In their studies, Lutron and Purdue discovered that the transmittance value of a shade fabric is directly linked to lighting energy savings and that it also dramatically affects the comfort of people in the space. Even a small shift in transmittance value has a huge effect on effective glare management and access to views.
With this groundbreaking discovery in hand, Lutron developed the Performance Shading Program – the industry’s first comprehensive program to recommend solar screen fabrics for optimal balance of glare reduction, daylight autonomy, and view preservation without sacrificing aesthetics. This program includes the following four components:
• Performance Shading Advisor with Fabric Wizard: a free web-based tool that allows users to enter project-specific inputs to select optimal fabrics based on calculations for glare reduction/daylight autonomy and view preservation – all while maintaining the aesthetic design of the space. Users can search and filter fabrics by priorities and even save project information, order fabric samples, and produce specs directly from the tool.
• THEIA Performance Specification: Commercially available solar screens today lack the tightly controlled fabric properties that Lutron and Purdue’s research showed were necessary to ensure proper performance. Today’s industry-standard fabric openness factors can vary by more than 2 percent from the specified value, potentially causing uncomfortable glare. THEIA-compliant fabrics solve this issue and are the first fabrics to tightly control openness within a tolerance of +/- .75 percent and Tv (visible light transmittance) within a tolerance of +/- 1 percent or +/- 20 percent mean Tv value to ensure that the optimal fabric is delivered as specified. They also follow EN14500 and ASTM 903 measurement standards.
• Performance Fabric Collection: a refined collection of fabrics with focused categories specifically designed to meet the needs of the core commercial market. The collection includes high-running Lutron commercial solar screen fabrics along with some new performance and sustainable fabrics.
• Performance Shading Solutions Binder: a consolidated kit that showcases, organizes, and explains Lutron’s Performance Fabric Collection in four easy-to-use decks.
“With the Performance Shading Program, Lutron not only makes choosing a fabric that balances aesthetics, performance, and daylight autonomy an easily selectable design choice, but we also ensure that the selected fabric meets the exact design intent through the strict THEIA specification," said Ed Blair, vice president and general manager of Lutron Electronics. “Our hope is that architects and designers embrace this program and begin to see shading fabrics as more than a furnishing and as an essential part of a building system’s performance.”
For more information, visit www.performanceshadingadvisor.com.
