Lichtvision Design

The oil refinery "PCK" in Schwedt has modernized its control room and had a building of about 1000 square meters constructed for this purpose. This building is a windowless bunker protected against fire and explosions. Here 6 teams work around the clock in 3 shifts. The partition walls between the teams are transparent glass walls. This allows a view of the entire control room from any point. The outer walls as room-defining surfaces were illuminated all around with wallwashers.

Each of the 26 workstations is illuminated by 2 pendant luminaires located between the workstations. The work surface is illuminated from the right and left. At each workstation, the direct component can be adjusted individually. The indirect part of the luminaires is controlled team wise. For this purpose, the pendant luminaire is divided into 3 DALI groups: The direct component for the right and left workstations and the indirect component. The luminaires are equipped with DALI drivers. The lighting is controlled centrally via a KNX backbone. The color temperature of the direct component is 3000°K, that of the indirect component 4000°K.
The client spared no effort to avoid a bunker-like atmosphere. Two spatial elements were developed for this purpose: The Digital Window and a Virtual Sky.

At the end of visual axes, large screens (upright) were mounted on the walls, each displaying a live stream from a webcam. Employees can thus observe what is happening in the outside space in the respective viewing direction.

The peanut-shaped central area of the control room is completely covered by a light ceiling with a size of approx. 110 sqm. This is equipped with LED-RGB tiles. Each pixel of a tile is individually addressable. The LED pixels have a distance of 6.25 cm. This makes it very easy to realize dynamic changes in weather conditions: passing clouds, twilight, night. In cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute, specifications for the light scene sequences (weather sequences) were developed. The bandwidth was defined in which the brightness and color temperature moves at different times of the day and night, while the view of the artificial sky changes continuously. The weather conditions are generated by a parameterized digital sky from a video server in real time.

More emotional moments are made possible by the overlay function of the powerful server. At irregular intervals, small events in the sky can be seen such as contrails from passing passenger planes, a hot air balloon, or birds. For special occasions, the logo of the corporation can fly in; for birthdays, balloons rise into the sky.

Through these elements, the lighting makes an important contribution to a pleasant quality of stay.