LUCE 331 | Page 31

Lights in sport The new lighting of the Palaindoor in Ancona he Palaindoor of Ancona is one of the many Italian excellences and the largest indoor athletics facility in Italy. Designed by the Buccione Architects studio, founded by the former Olympian walker Roberto Buccione, with the architectural company Éfaistos As, the sports arena was inaugurated in 2005. The Municipality of Ancona, which owns it, has entrusted the management to the FIDAL (Italian Athletics Federation) of the Marche region. The structure hosts Italian and international sporting events and manifestations, including the Italian Indoor championships and the Italian Paralympic championships. Given the great versatility of the space, it is also home to various types of events such as conventions, concerts and meetings. This year, the facility will feature a 460 m² warm-up room and a 600 m² high jump specialist gym. The CONI president Giovanni Malagò endorsed the proposal; in fact, 2020 is the year of the Tokyo Olympics, and Palaindoor is a candidate to be a possible Olympic training centre for athletes. With approximately 2,000 seats for the public, the structure has a square base with wooden lamellar arches supporting the roof and a wide range of equipment: gym, warm-up area, changing rooms, technical meeting rooms, giant screen, first aid and anti-doping room, speaker room, press room, VIP room, and cafeteria. In April 2019, the Municipality of Ancona awarded CPM Gestioni Termiche S.r.l., specialized in the global energy requalification of buildings and structures of the Public Administration, the concession of the energy service for the Palombare sports Citadel, which includes the Palaindoor structure. CPM has implemented the new internal lighting; the management of all systems will be completely digitized. Feilo Sylvania Italia S.p.A. entrusted the lighting design of the indoor athletics facility to the engineer Francesco Chiodaroli of Litelab, a studio with more than 20 years of specific experience in lighting design, with headquarters both in Buccinasco/Milan in Italy, and in Chennai and Bangalore in India. The former lighting arrangement provided a layout of 82 1,000 W E40 metal halide projectors, to obtain an average 600 lux. In the two photo-finish areas (60 m and 200 m ring), 1,000 lux were provided by a reinforcement of 12+9 projectors 250 W metal halide lamps. Engineer Chiodaroli told us that during the survey he was able to find out that the air ducts, clearly installed in a phase following the installation of the lighting, "produced large shaded areas on the ground, and therefore the levels were around 40-50% lower than in the surrounding areas." The survey he carried out showed that even in areas not shielded by the air ducts, the illuminance values remained far below the average 600 lux expected, also with poor uniformity (differences > 20%). This was happening, he explained to us, probably because the sources had uneven hours of operation due to punctual maintenance of exhausted bulbs, instead of the scheduled replacement of all the sources. At this point, we asked Engineer Francesco Chiodaroli to describe the lighting layout and the lighting design method adopted. What kind of lighting fixtures did you use? I will start saying that the first objective to be considered in the project for sports lighting is to guarantee the regulatory requirements of lighting levels and uniformity, followed by low-glare/visual comfort and efficiency/ eco-sustainability. For the new lighting layout, we were asked to create an average of 1000 lux distributed over the entire sports surface. The product chosen is the Sylbay Gen 2 by Sylvania: 6 HO DALI modules 34 105 lumen 222 W in the medium beam optic version. It has a sufficiently open photometry (half beam angle 61°) to ensure an adequate overlapping of the light emissions, a proper lighting even of the vertical surfaces, and the absence of sharp shadows. The photometry also maintains a strong directional component, necessary to be able to correctly orient the light emission of the various fixtures and achieve a very high level of uniformity (0.897 on the surface inside the track and 0.78 on the track, compared to 0.7 required by UNI 12193-2019). With an excellent efficiency of 154 lm/W, the Sylbay LED allows to reduce the total installed power to 42,180 W, compared to the previous 92,064 W. Which organization, both in terms of lighting but also in architectural or visual terms, has been given to the luminaires? The luminaires are arranged on 6 of the 13 existing beams on the roof, so as to: • not to use those on which the air ducts are suspended; Confronto tra vecchia illuminazione (sopra) e nuova illuminazione (sotto) in corrispondenza dei punti dei Rilievi Fotofinish / Comparison between the previous lighting (above) and the new lighting (below) in the Photofinish Measurement areas T DESIGNING LIGHT / LUCE 331 29