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Fiber Optics Bring the Sun Indoors
Sterling D. Allan writes "Fiber optics transmit light, so why not take the light from outside and transmit it inside? According to an exclusive story at PESN, that is what Tennessee company, Sunlight Direct, is now doing. Their 4-foot-diameter solar dish will light 1000 square feet inside -- minus the harmful UV rays -- rendering a more natural lighting feel, which can be hybridized with florescent and possibly LED lighting to provide a constant light level, though the tone changes with the level of light outside. The GPS-based sun-tracking mechanism uses very little energy. Now you can save electricity, cut on heat emissions by incandescent, and improve the feel of your work environment. Beta testing began in June. Product expected in the market in 2007."
we don't need light in our basements!! FP?
In the Australian interior (Coober Pedy and Lightning Ridge) they build many homes undergound...thsi kinds of thing would be perfect. Natural air conditioning and natural light sources.
The Ark Mori Building in Tokyo had a fiber optic solar light distribution system installed something like 10 years ago. I remember seeing a video of the system. It's been out for 10 years, but nobody did anything to follow it. My conclusion: it's worthless.
A guy who works at "Pure Energy System" posts exclusive article posted on PESN (Pure Energy System News)? Isn't that the same as a free ad?
Not that anything wrong with that...
now slap some fucking soil and grass and trees on those concrete roofs and we're in business.
This doesn't seem that new. Folx have had large-scale "fibre optic" types of skylights that can reach to basements and other areas for quite some time. I think they are even available at Home Depot.
www.solartube.com comes to mind right off the bat...
John Soward...University of Kentucky
Even when raining, the outdoor light feels much more comfortable and natural than indoor incandescent lightbulbs. I imagine the idea has been around since Gog the Hut Thatcher fell through one of his creations and the hut owners just left the hole in the roof.
Nowadays, they've got a nice system where the light is guided through a reflective tube that can be directed to any room in the house.
http://www.solatube.com/
It was only natural that the techonology would progress to where we are splitting the sunshine into fiber optics and redirecting them all over the house. However, 2007 is a pretty long way off for what seems to be a relatively simple application of existing technologies.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I remember seeing pictures of these on Japanese office buildings in the early 80s. They were called "Sunflowers", and they were mostly prototypes I think, and had a honeycomb set of collectors which piped the sunlight into the building.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Is there any way to store the photons in sunlight? Not convert them to electrons, then reemit them, but "trap" the photons in some medium, then emit them at some arbitrary later date? Without transforming some amount of their energy to heat or other mechanical energy. For retransmission later, like when the sun goes down.
Maybe a nanomaze of fiber, a few wavelengths in diameter, twisting its way around inside a cubic centimeter? If such a "photon trap" were millions of meters in length, it might be able to absorb photons for a while, before the first ones trapped finally made their way around the loop to the surface, during which time the trap could be closed (with a mirror, cycling the photons through the circuit until it was opened again. Or maybe an input window that's mirrored only on the inside, trapping photons continuously, until another mirrored facet is removed. Or a spiral maze of MEMs mirrors which send light around the cycle, until one is tilted away from the cycle, towards the output.
Is there any kind of work on "photonic storage"?
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make install -not war
RTFS!
God. Why does stupidity exponentiate when people desire to get an early post on a story?
Both the first paragraph of the article AND the description answer your concerns about harmful rays. Good job paying attention...
Why is a company that chooses not to filter UV any more liable than a government that chooses not to install a giant pair of Oakley sunglasses over the entire U.S.? I agree that filtering UV is a very, very good idea, but I don't see why not doing so merits a lawsuit.
Incidentally, the most efficiency you can hope to acheive with a solar panel is around 10% or so, and even that's an optimistic estimate I believe.
I moved my office from a building where we had NO windows. Productivity has gone up tremendously. We don't feel as worn out at the end of the day, and we don't feel like we missed out on anything.
I saw this on the Discovery channel, and it's fantastic for commerical space as you can distribute 'natural' light all over the office where windows can't be located. It saves on energy use as well. As yes, there are UV filters.
I wish it was a little more affordable, i'd do it in a heart beat.
Because photovoltaic cells have a limited lifespan. Some articles found state that a lifespan can be unlimited, some say about 30-35 years, but I've heard that the practical lifespan for powering household current is about 7 years- About as long as it takes to recoup the cost of purchasing the things in the first place.
Also, it can't be nearly as efficient to convert light to energy and back to light again as it is to simply redirect the light where it's wanted.
Of course, this would only work while the sun's up- You'd still need lightbulbs and other lighting infrastructure to light at night.
Blast a thinkgeek laser beam in reverse from your cubicle fiber port and wake up some alien race.
During the cold war there was much competition between American and Russian office productivity. The Americans spent millions delevoping a system to direct sunlight into buildings. It was awesome in its capabilities. The sun tracker used very little energy, the interior of the building was laced with miles of fiber optic cabling. All in all a wonder of modern engineering triumph.
When face with a similar problem, the Soviets used a "window".
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Here's an article from 1999, which notes: ..."
m
"Sound like science fiction? It's not. One such product, the
Himawari, has been commercially available for nearly 15 years
http://www.sun-tek.com/Docs/ArticleDaylighting.ht
Slashdot: 20-year-old news for nerds. Sigh.
Not to bash this solar lighting system or anything, but the author of the article is a bit of a nutcase-- she wrote a whole article about how we're all doomed because of the impending Magnetic Field Revesal, and another article about a scientist was killed in a conspiratorial fashion because of his "new energy" discoveries, which apparently came from space aliens.
So take this article with a big grain of alien-free salt.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
The article specifically says that it does:
As for the solar panels, I would think that they'd be a lot more expensive. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually checked.) The systems I've seen require large banks of batteries to store power, and there are a lot of expensive system components.
One nice thing about solar lighting is that there's really not much else other than a mirror and a bunch of fiber optic cables. It's a pretty simple system made of relatively cheap parts.
Also, one of the selling points of the company's Web site is that the lighting is all natural, not artificial, which is supposedly preferable for happy attitudes and such.
Of course, not having any lights at night or on cloudy days would totally suck. The article mentions that the system can be integrated with supplimental artifical lighting. Perhaps a combination of solar panels and solar lighting would be the best system if one wants cheap, eco-friendly lighting that is also mostly natural for happy attitudes.
> I saw a system like this on TV about 10 years ago
IIRC, it was invented by Wyle E. Coyote.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Errr, wait a minute, something's not right here. First we build a structure- wind, quake, water, sun, (and even fire)-proof, then we build another gadget to bring the sun into our buildings. I'm no architect, but the buildings we can see all around us are convincing proof that we can ensure natural sunlight reaches most parts of the interior of our buildings - we have sun roofs, open areas, North facing buildings (in the Southern hemisphere), even simple windows.
This gadget is just a bunch of boys' toy, and will be forgotten in a few years. I suggest we pay more attention to the architects who are building our environments to ensure we never need such devices in the first place. A bit of design in the beginning saves plenty of effort later. For example, you won't need to crack your brains figuring out safety regulations, building codes and installation hassles for a fibre optics light and heat guide...
This would be fantastic for lighting the insides of Arcologies. Something I've always thought was a big negative for city sized buildings is whereas you have a huge volume for everything you have relatively less surface area for windows, and as someone else posted here lack of natural light can be really bad for you... in a large-sized arcology you'd have huge sections with no windows...
Just a random thought on an application.
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."
At 1.98892 × 10^30 kilograms these "fiber optic" dudes better get started now!
There is truth in humor.
That's just more ransom money in my pocket when I complete my sun-blocking machine...
This was posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago.
And many posters (including me) pointed out that sun pipes have been around a long time.
The main benefit would be the lessened heat dissipation. I've been in far too many elevators that have what seems like way too many incandescents in the roof that make the elevator very hot, especially this time of year.
Looking at my latest electricity bill, I'm charged 13 cents (Australian, roughly) per kilowatt hour. Ten dollars is 77 kilowatt hours; that's equivalent to running one of those things for 5,000 hours (again, roughly).
Working period is 8 hours a day, five days a week -- forty hours a week. 5,000 hours is therefore 125 weeks, or about two and a half years. Multiply that figure by the number of square feet a standard bulb can illuminate (it'd be, what, about 50 square feet at a guess?), and you have a break-even point of 125 years.
If they're replacing incandescent bulbs (which use four times the electricity), break even comes down to about 30 years.
Points to consider:
- My pricing for electricity is residential rates. Industrial and commercial rates are probably different. Anybody have solid figures?
- I'm guessing with the 50 square feet per bulb. If a bulb can light more area, the time to breakeven increases accordingly. If less, it decreases.
- Businesses typically use fluorescent tubes, not bulb replacements. I don't know how much energy those use, nor how much area they can light.
- Does this price include installation? If not, there's an added expense before break even is reached.
- You'll also need other lighting to supplement this system on badly overcast days, and at night, reducing the payoff.
The price will have to drop a bit based upon my back-of-the-envelope calculations before this becomes viable. If anybody has better figures than the ones I've given, please, speak up -- I'm genuinely curious. In particular, I don't know how much electricity costs a business in the USA; that is the single biggest factor in determining payoff time.Why would they need GPS tracking? It's not like the building is going to move. I suppose they are using the time/date signal to compute where point the dish. Good luck fumbling around in the dark when the military scrambles the GPS in response to a terrorist threat though. Why don't they simply use a set of phototransistors instead, no computing required?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I wonder if these fiber optic roofs will allow people (spy satellites?) to see inside a room when the luminosity inside the room is higher than that outside. Think of it like peering into a house's front windows at night -- as long as the living room lights are on, you can see in, but they can't see out.
a)the earth's magnetic field does reverse every so often, b)we're overdue (by a huge margin) and c)we probably would be slightly fucked, because during the flip, we'd have no protection from cosmic and solar radiation.
NOVA
Wikipedia Article on Geomagnetic Reversal
As for the aliens- yep, she's off her rocker on that one, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Please help metamoderate.
What about using the light collector as night too.
Because it replaces the use of ceiling lights during the day you use just put a 1,000 Watt spotlight into the reflector at night. If you had 100 x 10W tubes to replace it may even be cheaper in the long run due to tube replacement and lighting fixtures...
I dunno if this is correct but I would be glad if someone could tell me.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
sorry I couldn't see it on maps.google - probably due to the buildings all being underground :)
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Install some glass windows and skylights. More sunlight for a fraction of the price. Want to be able to turn it off? Just install some blinds.
What reason could you possibly have for using GPS to track the damned sun?
Three or four photosensors and a PIC 12 could do the same thing at a cost of about a dollar. Hell, you could skip the micro and do it all in hardware for probably 50 cents. If you must assume the person installing it is too bloody stupid to adjust the angle of the device to allow for one-axis tracking (see Equatorial Mount), then it would be more like 9 or 16 sensors in a dome pattern. STILL about a hundred times cheaper than the cheapest GPS-on-a-chip system (plus the code one would have to write to make it work).
Personally, I avoid buying things that make me seriously question the sanity of those who are selling it.
And: WHY THE HELL WAS THIS POSTED!? Come on, this is so not new anything.
I could swear I remember a TV news report from the late 80s early 90s where this was being done in one of the new skyscrapers in Japan.
Or you could just blast a hole in the wall or something. Of course, I'm pretty sure it would be a bad idea to bring the sun indoors. Even if you could fit it, you'd incinerate everything around you. Plus other nasty side effect.
You know, using thermonuclear fusion to desalinize water in oceans and use it for watering agricultural terrains is pretty old too. It's called rain.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Isn't a GPS overkill for this? How about an array of three photocells aimed slightly differently on the X and Y axis to tell the dish to move towards the greater amount of light?
Btw, it's not (just) the UV I'd want to filter. While indoor all-over tanning in complete privacy might be nice, I'd be more interested in filtering out heat in the summer, and allowing it in during the Winter.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Even when I just had a view of the company generator and a few pigeons, it was better than any diffuse piped light source could ever be. The problem being "solved" here is a fault of US corporate culture that will eventually go away of its own accord when gigantic buildings with dark interiors go out of fashion.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Isn't using GPS for sun tracking just a tad over-engineered? Why not just track the big bright thing in the sky using simple optical sensors? And if it's too cloudy to get a good fix on the sun, well, the system isn't going to do you any good anyway...
$8k will install at least a 2KW system.
And that's from a licensed dealer who's making money hand over fist as the panels can be had for around 600$, the connection equipment and batteries add up.
Now lets reject the IR into a water-tube to capture that as surplus energy too and we've got a better system that costs less...