Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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"?
--
make install -not war
RTFS!
God. Why does stupidity exponentiate when people desire to get an early post on a story?
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.
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
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
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...
Ultra low tech (no fibers) but it produces very nicely colored light in an interior room. I thought they were too pricey, though. Then I saw this article, where they want $8000! Wow.
John
That's just more ransom money in my pocket when I complete my sun-blocking machine...
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
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.
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
My parents have one of these in their kitchen. Works very well, actually, and the light is very white and pleasant. This is much better than a skylight for several reasons. The first is that the light is not directional, but very diffuse, giving good light all over. Second, you don't really have to clean the dome. Third, it goes through your insulation, and is sealed at both ends, keeping a decent separation of you from the hot/cold. Finally, it's pretty small and easy to install yourself if you're handy with a caulk gun. I'd definitely get one of these if I had a house.
I've seen the Mori Building solar collectors (on TV). The idea was that they could transport natural light into areas of the building that are not near windows, and that sunlight seems to make people happier. And they didn't need GPS to do it because the sun is, y'know, fairly predicable.
But you're right that light fibers aren't exactly big news for illumination. And they're not the only medium with low transmission losses, either. About 20 years ago, a friend of mine started up a company called TIR Systems to commercialize a light pipe technology that he developed in grad school. It works approximately like optical fiber but the prism light guide is much larger, and also requires less elaborate manufacture. The early materials that I saw were pressed out of large slabs of acrylic or something. At any rate, it seems much better suited to architectural application than bundles of optical fiber. And that's old news too.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
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"
Of course, as (almost) always, Wright's vision was just a wee bit ahead of the materials science of the day; the whole setup used to leak like crazy. But what the hell -- it sure was gangbusters back in 1939, when the future was invented.