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)."

Comments

This is nothing new...

[qwertphobia]

all the Amish retailers here use the same sort of thing. They can light a supermarket with redirected light during daylight hours, and light up the propane system once the natural light is gone.

Re:This is nothing new...

[qwertphobia]

They need to be able to understand all aspects of the design.

Propane is just a burning gas, but gasoline employs internal combustion engines and refineries and all that.

They're more relaxed than they used to be, especially for their businesses, but they still try to keep it down to basics where feasable.

Their buggies need blinking lights by law, so they have no choice but to give in on some technologies.

Re:This is nothing new...

[Washizu]

If you watch the documentary, Devil's Playground they answer this question specifically. It's not technology they are against, it's the way technology affects their culture. For example, a telephone isn't bad in itself but it takes away from time spent with the family or working. In an emergency, they use them.

The documentary is mostly about Amish kids when they go on their "rumspringa," but I learned a ton about the Amish in general.

Mid 80's

[clinko]

This was done in Japan in the Mid 80's.

It was on Beyond 2000 (The tv show.)

The roof of the building had the ends of fiber optics and every desk had a tube-like lamp.

They said it was to freshen up the workers.

The funny part: In the mid 90's I heard a similar building was sued by an employee for skin cancer!

Gotta love it.

TIR Systems

[starfishsystems]

A physicist friend of mine named Lorne Whitehead started up a company about twenty years ago to manufacture light pipes based on the principle of prismatic reflection.

The startup phase has its usual challenges, I'm sure, especially finding markets, but the company has become very successful and very well known.

It's called TIR Systems .

(Unfortunately I can't comment on the cited article as it's already slashdotted.)

(Very) Old idea, new technology

[Ironsides]

This is a pre-electricity invention. The only thing that is new is that they are using fibre optics instead of glass for carrying the light. Here's a LinkTo Shipboard Prisms that was used and patented way back in 1684. A good 331 years ago.

I remember...

[eno2001]

...back in the 80s, there was a prototype of something like this. It was an extremely high quality glass "light tube" that could actually visually carry light and whatever was at the other end of the tube. The experimental set up they were talking about mentioned a basement lab with six of these around the room. They looked like round windows or portals in the wall, but they actually looked straight up to the sky. You could look in one and see clouds going by. Sounded pretty cool. I think it was featured in The Futurist magazine in 88 or 89.

Or sunpipe..

[PopeAlien]

..and its brand new! well, it was 13 years ago.

..and I know T.I.R. systems has been making light-pipe for at least that long.. not that its not cool, its just sort of, you know.. old.

Re:Or sunpipe..

[tomhudson]

What I really would like to see is the "slow windows" of science fiction - where you have a glass-like medium through which the speed of light is EXTREMELY slow, say taking 10 years to travel through the pane.

Put the window in a field for 10 years, let it soak up the sunlight and the scenery, then hang it indoors on any wall, and get a clear view of what went on 10 years ago.

Of course, since light goes both ways, at the end of the 10 years, if you unmount the window and look in from the back you'd be able to see what went on in the house 10 years ago. I can see a LOT of people (hello Michael Jackson) "accidently breaking" their slow windows when they expire.

Oh, well, maybe the next version of Longhorn will give us a similar experience with "slow windows [tt]"

Re:Or sunpipe..

[lgw]

I'm just as happy to have a high standard of living by paying the actual cost, instead of a low standard of living from paying your imagined cost. ;) Or didn't you notice that we can *greatly* reduce pollution while continuing to use more energy?

Smog Alerts in the Los Angeles area:
1975: 118
1980: 102
1985: 83
1990: 42
1995: 14
2000: 0

And what's this obsession with carbon these days? Even if you choose to believe that human activity is somehow causaly related to global warming, it's a bit of a reach to pin the blame on carbon.

Some math for you:

• Man-made C02 is about 3.2% of atmospheric CO2
  
• Atmospheric CO2 contributes about 3.6% of the greenhouse effect
  
• The greenhouse effect accounts for about 45% of the heat at the Earth's surface
  
• Man-made CO2 = 3.2% * 3.6% * 45% ~= 0.05% of the heat at the Earth's surface

Isn't that interesting. One twentieth of one percent of the heat at the Earth's surface is due to man-made CO2.

But I'm sure it will continue to be fashionable to argue that any mainstream idea is wrong for as long as a counter-culture exists.

Re:It's called...

[NETHED]

Sad but true. A solar Powered flashlight

Versus developing LED technologies?

[behindthewall]

I'm not conversant in the details, but my understanding is that the latest generations of LED technology are making rapid gains. And recently, advances in getting decent white/fuller spectrum light out of them have been made and/or hinted at.

Given that these things can be installed using current systems, and have very low current draw and heat generation, I'm wondering how well what is essentially an architectural design element, with the implications of same from implementation through to building code (including safety features such and firewalling and the like) will be able to compete against LED fixtures and similar.

Re:Sunblock?

[JohnAllison]

More than likely the answer is yes. Yet it is important to remember that UV filter material is cheap, think sunglasses.

Please also note that engineers, presumably like the grandparent, would remember to design such filters if only to save their own skin.

Re:Deck prisms and SOLF tubes

[macklin01]

I remember playing with lots of fun stuff like that at 3M when I had a brief fiber optics internship there. One of my favorites was a longish (maybe 15 feet) solid plastic tube of high refractive index and a translucent cladding, about a half inch in diameter. (Just a big multimode fiber, really.)

We'd have it all coiled up, point one end at the indoor lights, and point the other end wherever we wanted, and it made a fairly bright spot. It was pretty cool. -- Paul

Re:Sunblock?

[afxgrin]

No UV-B (or UV-A) rays would make it that far down the tube - most glass attenuates UV quite well.

You'd need to get some stupidly expensive glass (like the kind used in photolithography) to transmit the UV down the light pipe.

I did a quick search on google, and came across this about glass absorbing UV:

"From: James Richmond (Avatar) 15/02/99 12:39:42
Subject: re: sunburn and car windows post id: 1216
As others have said, glass absorbs UV reasonably effectively. I am reminded of a story told by the late Richard Feynman, who was present at the first nuclear bomb detonation. The bomb was mounted on a tower in the desert. Everyone was issued with dark goggles to protect their eyes from the flash as the bomb went off. The goggles were almost opaque, making it difficult to see anything. Feynman figured that the only dangerous thing would be the UV light, and he wanted to get a good look at the explosion, so he sat in a car and watched through the windscreen (without goggles), assuming that the screen would absorb much of the harmful UV. As a result, he probably got the best naked-eye view of anyone present."

Source