The Shape of a Sports Hall

The shape of a sports hall is largely governed by the number and types of sports taking place in it. For instance, halls are usually based on numbers of badminton courts. Common layouts are 3 , 4 , 6 and 8 court. For a badminton based sports hall, a minimum ceiling height of 7.6 metres is recommended by sportscotland. Floor dimensions for the principle sports can be found from the sportscotland guidance publications.

The designs can therefore be based around simple box forms and any windows should be part of the structure outwith the playing volumes. The orientation of the hall is very important when it comes to daylighting, and is directly related to how the windows will be placed in the structure.

Lamp Selection

Factors to consider in selecting lamps:

modelling of projectiles

dim or stepped switching

Installed cost

power consumption

re-lamping cost

sensible lamp life

colour quality

colour stability

frequency/strobe

warm up time

presence detection/economy

emergency use

black hole if lamp fails

perceived brightness

Maintenance

The maintenence requirement of a glazed area depends in part on its vulnerability to dirt and these need to be factored into any calculations about light transmission.

Understanding Daylighting of Sports Halls

Colour Recognition

Colour recognition in sports halls is important for distinguishing the various court markings and playing objects. Modern fluorescent lighting can be designed to closely imitate natural light. Fluorescent lamps can have a CCT range between Ra50 and Ra80. High temperature light sources (such as tungsten halogen) can achieve higher values of Ra, but are inefficient for sports halls. Fluorescent lighting and that from mercury halide lamps are most suitable. Low pressure sodium lamps (street lamps) are unsuitable for sports halls.

In order to achieve the best of artificial lighting and daylighting levels it is imperative to design the lighting and its control system so that the artificial lighting attains an illuminance suitable to the sport taking place, but will set-back to allow daylight to replace it, when available. This requires a lighting system of similar characteristics to daylight in terms of both colour temperature and colour rendering, see photo on right.

Other methods of integrating daylight with artificial light include hiding the light - either the artificial or daylight source - so that differences between the two are indistinguishable. Hiding

sources could involve uplighting, but this can also increase the energy consumption of artificial lighting due to the losses encountered when reflecting light. A compromise is often sought, which must not be to the detriment of the occupants.

Reflectivity

Surface reflectances are the same for daylit and artificially lit halls, with perhaps higher reflectances on the surfaces around and “visible to” the windows. This reduces contrast and avoids glare. Ceilings must have a high reflectance (0.8) and this is especially true for halls with rooflights.

Uniformity

The uniformity of an artificial lighting installation must be close to that for the daylighting in order to provide an integrated light source. It is possible to increase the uniformity of artificial lighting so that it can counteract any offset from the daylight. Particular care must be taken when arranging the layout of the luminaires. For badminton halls, the lights must be placed outside the area of the courts, as can be seen in the photo (right). This avoids players having to look up directly into the lights. Doing this also decreases the uniformity, which must be counteracted by increasing the number of luminaires, with an increase in energy consumption being an unfortunate by-product.