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Sunlight in a Tube
Elitist_Phoenix writes "Scientists are developing a technology to save energy by transmitting sunlight into buildings through tubes. Indoor electric lighting is the largest consumer of electricity in commercial buildings. Their new system. called hybrid solar lighting, would reduce this energy usage with fixtures that supplement or completely replace electric light with sunlight, at times when its available. The system is called hybrid solar lighting (Google)."
You can buy them off the shelf:
http://www.skylights-of-hawaii.com/page13.html
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http://www.solatube.com/
one in a windowless bathroom and another in the kitchen, this is not new, mine are over 10 years old...
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The Department of Energy has some information on solar lighting available here.
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This stuff has been available for 15 years.
Has there been a breakthrough? A cost drop? Or is it just that Oak Ridge started playing with it?
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From the article:
In the system, a rooftop collector concentrates and sends sunlight through optical fibers, tubes made of special, high-purity material that transmit light by reflecting it down their inner walls.
Feh... that would be recycled sunlight
Its called a Tubular Skylight
Environmental Building News, Volume 8, Number 10 - October 1999
Imagine a device that sits on the roof of a building and focuses sunlight into cables the size of electrical wire. These cables are run through walls and ceiling plenums into light fixtures that beam natural, full spectrum daylight deep into a building's interior."
it's called Hybrid Lighting or Daylighting. Been around for a looooooong time.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Actually, this is different than simple redirected light. Check out this link for more information. Basically, it runs the sunlight through fiberoptic cables to light fixtures that work much like our current light bulbs. These means that you won't have to have serious architectural redesigns of buildings to get the same effect. It also will generate electricity that can be used for other applications (powering computers?). It is basically a hybrid approach to lighting.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
You can already buy systems like this - check out this link for an example (no connection to me, incidentally). They work on total internal reflection and they're pretty simplistic beasts. I think the 'new' system is simply extending this concept - but it's hardly new.
Dearie me, yesterday's news for nerds indeed - architects have been using these systems for at least a few years now...
[shuffles off back under his stone...]
All of you who are immediately attacking the idea saying "haven't we done this before" are missing the point. This is not just redirected light. It is transporting the light through fiberoptic cables and transferring that energy through regular light fixtures. This would allow solar power to light internal rooms that don't have windows. It also will generate electricity for other internal applications beyond light.
This technology would allow businesses to retrofit their buildings with solar light without having to do heavy remodelling to add skylights (the old way of doing it). This can be especially difficult for multi-floored buildings with internal rooms. Please read about the technology before immediately dismissing it as "nothing new".
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Actually thats not how they evaluate it.
l
For instance, Amish are trying out cell phones. They are picky, but the criteria they use is 'will the tech bring us closer together or drive us further apart?'
For instance, they tried land phones...and apparently the lines got crossed, and someone heard a neighbor badmouthing her...
They also felt it was rude to leave the people that were in your house to talk to someone who's 'not there.'
For those reasons, they didn't adpot telephones.
But they are using computers (powered by their own generators).
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/amish.htm
On the not new front, these work really well. And I'm fairly sure you can pick them up (simple ones anyway) at Lowes.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
"Indoor electric lighting is the largest consumer of electricity in commercial buildings."
Where is this true? I worked as a stationary engineer in commercial buildings for years. HVAC was, I thought, always the biggest consumption of power. Of course, I'm in Las Vegas where in the summer the power bills are 4 times in the summer what they are in the fall.
Sailing ships used compact prisms to convey light to interior rooms without the need for large areas of fragile glass.
And 3M had a material called SOLF, a vaguely Scotchlite-like material with tiny prism that could be made into tubes with highly efficient nearly-total internal reflection, that could carry light in, say, six-inch pipes over distances of many yards with negligible loss. Not terribly expensive, either.
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You can't be serious but I'll bite.....
+ pump
http://www.google.com/search?&q=water+source+heat
Water source heat pump.
Been there done that for a long time.
Windows don't work too well on interior rooms. Just ask that guy in the inner-inner office at work how much outside light he gets.
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And we had to walk 10 miles barefoot through the snow in a jungle full of hungry tigers and shuriken-wielding ninjas to get that sunlight.
The new version they've been installing here in California since the mid-90s has a shiny mirrored duct about 8 in diameter that can carry sunlight about 10 feet and through a couple of 30 degree turns. They are pretty cheap, about $500 each, and work pretty well. You can get models fortitifed with compact flourescents.
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The prevailing opinion here seems to be that this is a stupid story, because light pipes are old news. Two people have even been moderated up to +5 for posting links to light pipe vendors.
Light pipes are NOT the story here. Hybrid lighting is a NEW lighting system which separates the visible and IR components of sunlight, directing the visible components to room lighting and the IR components to thermo-voltaic generator, which stores electrical energy to light the room after the sun has gone down. Ordinary light pipes do not do that.
From the U.S. Department of Energy Solar FAQ:
Q:How does a hybrid solar lighting (HSL) system work?
A:Imagine being able to light your home or office most of the day, and on most days, with sunlight, but not the kind that comes through the windows. That's what hybrid solar lighting (or HSL) systems are being developed to do. Prototype HSL systems are made up of roof-mounted concentrators that collect and separate the visible and infrared portions of sunlight. The visible portion of the light is distributed through large-diameter optical fibers to hybrid luminaires. (Hybrid luminaires are lighting fixtures that contain both electric lamps and fiber optics to distribute sunlight directly.) Unlike conventional electric lamps, the solar component of HSL produces little heat.
The remaining "invisible" energy in the sunlight, mostly infrared radiation, is directed to a concentrating thermo-photovoltaic (solar) cell that very efficiently converts infrared radiation into electricity. The resulting electric power can be directed to other uses in a building. When sunlight is plentiful, the fiber optics in the luminaires can provide all or most of the light needed in a particular area. But when there is little or no sunlight, sensor-controlled electric lamps turn on to maintain the desired illumination level.
Independent cost and performance models suggest the overall affordability of solar energy could be doubled or tripled by using this new hybrid approach. The multidisciplinary R&D effort involved in developing HSL includes several industrial and university partners. Other Resources:
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William Wheeler invented a system to light up buildings with light pipes in 1880.
sitting right here on my desk. Has internal nicads, you can also put replaceable batteries, is a flashlight and a radio with am/fm. Has some solar cells integrated with the body, just leave it in a sunny spot in front of a window, keeps it charged. It also has a small crank on the end, has an internal dynamo so you can charge it that way as well, and to top it off, has an external 6VDC jack in. man, you got some options with the power there! One of the better gadgets I ever bought. All it lacks is the bulb is incandescent, I should see about making it LED sometime. Label on it says "Craig Marathon"
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Yup, it wouldn't work. The impedance mismatch (around 10^16:1) would be so high that both reflection and refraction would be extreme at both sides of the glass. The window would be quite opaque - in fact, it would be more reflective than anything we could make today.
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These Existing Solar Tube of systems are great for Houses, but they lose a lot of light per metre so there value in using them to pipe light to the lower floor of even a two storey house is limited. also they lack flexibility as the collector needs to basically be above the area the light is wanted.
The System from the article is not that new either, the basic idea has been around for a while. Although the cost of the Optic Fibre (vs. under priced electric power) has always been a factor limiting the deployment of systems such as the one in the article.
The Advantage of and Optic Fibre System is that optic fibre can carry light at much lower loss levels per metre. This means a fibre system is good for multi-storey work, like commercial office buildings.
Where we are trying to push the light 7-8m(21-26ft) horizontally into the building. Vertically allow say +3m(10-12ft) per floor. In an 8 storey building you need to be able to push light around 40m and around many corners.
An the advantages of using natural light are more than just the power saving. Using Natural light can vastly improve the health of the building. Enclosed areas like fire stairs, toilets, plant rooms will all stay cleaner if lit with natural light.
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Some of these gases, unfortunately, are pretty toxic to us.
This has happened before, without our intervention. We're just conducting an experiment on a much larger scale than is "natural".
We just to look at the death tolls from the heat wave of 2003 http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2003-09-25-fr ance-heat_x.htm, almost 15,000 in France alone, to see what being unprepared for more violent temperature swings can do.
Well, at least Canada will probably have more land that will be useable, so we will be able to take SOME of the burden off other countries. Unfortunately, large parts of the frozen tundra will just be bogs if they thaw out, not really suitable for farming.
It's going to be u.g.l.y.