Allaeys LED Instruments supplies award-winning BP project

BP trading floor An important challenge in designing the new headquarters of BP Oil International, situated between level 1 and level 6 of 20 Canada Square in Canary Wharf, London, was the introduction of a new lighting concept. Lighting for the trading areas and offices on BP floors, measuring a total of 240,000 square feet, "pushes the boundaries of present lighting guidelines and challenges the concepts behind present CIBSE guidelines “ says Paul Pompili, senior M&E consultant at Meit Associates (currently at ISG).

Meit Associates was the lighting designer for the project, which won the "Workplace Lighting" award at the Lighting Design Awards 2006.

The new lighting concept is based on a mixture of special 1.5 m square luminaires creating an illuminated ceiling and illuminated vertical surfaces and achieving high lighting levels (up to 1000 lux) and a color-changing effect.

Color-changing was introduced in the meeting rooms on levels 1 and 2, which have glass walls and illuminated ceilings. The ceilings have fluorescent downlights for functional lighting as well as a color-changing raft to indicate the status of the meeting rooms. When the meeting room is free, the raft produces one of BP’s corporate colors. When the meeting room is engaged, the raft produces white light.

The creation of the BP corporate colors was a serious challenge. By using a combination of red, green, blue and amber power LEDs, all corporate colors could easily be produced.

As LEDs are an innovative technology, the installation required a lot of attention and precise wiring. Allaeys LED Instruments, a Belgian LED lighting manufacturer, manufactured a custom-built LED light fitting in which all LEDs, RGBA drivers and power supplies were mounted and prewired. The fittings were easily installed and the wiring was a plug-and-play system.

Where's the bunny? For the lighting of the rafts, the LED light fitting was equipped with the power LED only hereby creating a good mixture of all basic colors. The creation of the different colors is managed by a web browser which generates a DMX 512 signal.

Ambient walls at the back of the offices create vertical illumination. Four pictures frames, each about 13 to 14 m long, display pleasant scenes. The images are printed onto the screens and are backlit using LEDs in the form of custom-built LED light fittings using a combination of red, green, amber and blue power LEDs.

For easy installation, the walls used the same LED light fitting developed for the rafts. A small alteration was carried out to hold lenses on the power LEDs, which serve to improve the scene backlighting in conjunction with the reflection of the white backwalls.

For the project, a total of 10,000 Luxeon I LEDs divided over four colors were used. 1.5 tons of aluminum was extruded, and 305 specially designed four-color drives were developed by Allaeys LED Instruments.