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
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