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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)."
How the hell am I going to maintain my pasty zombie-like complexion if they allow sunlight into the building?
Trolling is a art,
So what SPF will my employer be required to provide for my balding head?
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)."
I think it might be called hybrid solar lighting? Not sure though. Could anyone confirm?
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.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
A nifty little invention called a "win-dow".
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I live in Britain you insensitive clod!
You can buy them off the shelf:
http://www.skylights-of-hawaii.com/page13.html
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
entirely content-free story on Slashdot? Look at the Google Cache of the first link!
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It's called "Lux-In".
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
I have large, rectangular transparent panels installed in many of my exterior walls. They work very well!
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
What's wrong with Lightsabres?
"Hey, Yoda, back off, ya trying to blind me?"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
After Scientists tackled the perplexing problem of getting light through a wall, via what is now called a "window," they moved on to the even more confounding "wheel," "fire," and "walking erect" problems. More news on these stories as they develop.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
And how do you expect to get window lighting to an office 50 feet from any exterior wall? Unless you think every floor of an office building should have no walls...
http://www.solatube.com/
one in a windowless bathroom and another in the kitchen, this is not new, mine are over 10 years old...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The Department of Energy has some information on solar lighting available here.
--It's Pimptastic!--
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.
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?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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
They want their Popular Science article back.
(This is not intended to flame the parent post... it's along the vein of "This is nothin new...")
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.)
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
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
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!
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.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It's called "mold".
Infuriate left and right
"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.
What about all the programmers who are zombies, vampires and other assorted undead? This was one profession where they had a chance of equal rites because they didn't stand out from the crowd.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
...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.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
..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.
air and light and time and space
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.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
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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Sad but true. A solar Powered flashlight
--sig fault--
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.
Wouldn't these optical waveguides also pipe quite a bit of heat into the room? This would be great in some areas, but I would think that the areas that would most likely have enough sunlight to benefit from this tech would be in hotter climates. would we just be trading lighting bills for cooling bills?
\/\/oobie
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"
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.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
I saw a working demonstration of this about 10 years ago. Why the all the noise now?
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.
When the seas rise an average of 35', forcing billions of people from their homes, I don't think "countries" will be a useful way to describe the world anymore. Combined with all the other upheavals, especially the severe drinking water crisis and the probable end of cheap oil, it's going to be a.p.o.c.a.l.y.p.t.i.c. - and manmande.
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make install -not war