Abstract: Nowadays street lighting accounts for 53% of outdoor lighting use and the market is continuously increasing. In the context of rising energy prices and growing environmental awareness, energy efficiency is becoming one of the most important criteria for street lighting systems design. LED-based lights have become the primary option for replacing conventional light bulbs, being digitally controllable, small, highly efficient, and cheap to manufacture. Advanced control strategies adapted to ambient conditions are needed to combine low energy consumption and high quality light ambience according to changing specifications. This paper describes an outdoor lighting solution aimed at energy efficient performance in the context of multipurpose outdoor environments, where control is crucial in achieving efficiency improvements. The work addresses efficiency at the component level, by optimizing the performance of LED drivers, and at system level, defining the control strategy and associated hardware infrastructure. The approach designed was tested in a real environment. The performance of the lighting installation was assessed using the web-based monitoring application, providing real-time consumption information and aggregated historical data.

Abstract: The relative coolness-to-touch of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) has enabled commercial implementation of intracanopy lighting (ICL) in the greenhouse. Intracanopy lighting, which refers to the strategy of lighting along the side or from within the foliar canopy, can increase canopy photosynthetic activity, but physiological and productivity responses of high-wire greenhouse tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) to intracanopy supplemental lighting (SL) still are not yet fully understood. Two consecutive production experiments were conducted across seasons in a glass-glazed greenhouse located in a midnorthern, continental climate [lat. 40°N (West Lafayette, IN)]. Plants were grown from winter-to-summer [increasing solar daily light integral (DLI)] and from summer-to-winter (decreasing solar DLI) to compare three SL strategies for high-wire tomato production across changing solar DLIs: top lighting with high-pressure sodium lamps (HPS) vs. intracanopy LED vertical towers vs. hybrid SL (HPS + horizontal ICL-LEDs). A control treatment also was included for which no SL was provided. Supplemental DLI for each experimental period was adjusted monthly, to complement seasonal changes in sunlight, aiming to approach a target total DLI of 25 mol·m‒2·d‒1 during fruit set. Harvest parameters (total fruit fresh weight, number of fruit harvested, and average cluster fresh weight), tissue temperature, chlorophyll fluorescence, and stomatal conductance (gS) were unaffected by SL treatment in both experiments. Among the physiological parameters evaluated, CO2 assimilation measured under light-saturating conditions, light-limited quantum-use efficiency, and maximum gross CO2 assimilation (Amax) proved to be good indicators of how ICL reduces the top-to-bottom decline in leaf photosynthetic activity otherwise measured with top lighting only (HPS-SL or solar). Although SL generally increased fruit yield relative to control, lack of SL treatment differences among harvest parameters indicates that higher crop photosynthetic activity did not increase fruit yield. Compared with control, intracanopy SL increased yield to the same extent as top SL, but the remaining photoassimilate from ICL most likely was partitioned to maintain nonharvested, vegetative plant parts as well.