FluoroSolar — Bringing the Sunshine Inside
by Warren McLaren, Sydney 
on 05. 2.06
While we encourage, nay, plea for smarter designed buildings that bring their occupants fresh air and natural light, it’s a sad fact that many work and live without these core amenities. Where artificial light is provided, say into offices, it is suggested that this contributes up to 20% of that buildings electrical demand. A product due to be commercially available in a couple of years may reduce that energy load. FluoroSolar is a light pipe with a difference. It separates white sunlight into the three spectrums of Red, and Green, using fluorescent dyed plastics (and solar powered LEDs to get Blue as there no appropriate fluorescent blue dyes). These three bands of coloured light are then transported anywhere within a building to be reassembled into the original white light. Achieving an intensity of up to two 75 watt light bulbs. All powered free of fossil fuels. The system can run under floors, through wall cavities, or over ceilings. Unlike current skylight configurations, the FluoroSolar systems is able to provide light without any transference of the Infrared spectrum, meaning no summer heat gain, (nor winter heat loss), hopefully also reducing air conditioning demand. Yet the anticipated cost about the same as a skylight, with less installation work involved. One of the programs scientists at University of Technology, Sydney, suggests the system is “as revolutionary as the filament light bulb was 125 years ago.” See a short video to judge for yourselves. ::FluoroSolar.
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I think buildings should be designed from the beginning to allow plenty of natural daylight to spread throughout the interior with the use of windows, which also can be used for solar heating and ventilation. Obviously, not all buildings can achieve such a goal. Not all locations are ideal for using windows for solar heating. And preexisting buildings tend to be difficult to add windows to. So this technology sure comes in handy. Using electricty for lighting during daylight hours should become a thing of the past.
It would be nice if the infrared light could be optional. I.e. in winter you would like the infrared bringen some extra heat into the building. In summer you shut it of.
Wait, I thought that fiber optics was the elegant solution for this? These systems seem very kludgey and prone to problems when compared to FO. Am I missing something?
While it would be nice for buildings to be designed like this in the first place, what do we do with buildings that already exist? Tear them down and build new ones? That doesn't sound very treehugger.
This sounds like a great idea for me. I've been wanting to install a light pipe to my basement, but it would take a bit of work. If this is, as they claim, The same price as a conventional light pipe, I could be gardening in my basement over the winter!
And, sometimes, it's not the building designers who don't want natural light and fresh air. My boss insists on turning the A/C on if it's over 60 degrees outside, and has four tubes in each flourescent light fixture burning away for ten to twelve hours a day.
I have half a mind to turn off our air conditioner and take out two tubes in each fixture.
um... why is splitting the light and then recombining it an improvement? the efficiency can't be better than a single light-pipe carrying unfiltered sunlight, and the solar-led solution must be pretty low efficiency. Is the benefit changing the mix of colours? surely not, as we go to great lengths to reproduce natural sunlight spectrums.
the splitting is necessary to get rid of the infrared part of the spectrum, that heats up the building. You don't want this in summer.
Chiny beat me to it. I thought you could transmit all the light one wanted in any direction within a building with Fiber optics?
Is this wrong? Is the price prohibitive of fiber optics?
Ok, so this device is NOT splitting light.
What is happening is the fluourescent dye in the plastic is being (funnily enough) fluoresced, which basically means the molecules are getting excited by the UV part of the light spectrum and releasing lower-energy (visible) photons of their own.
So, the visible part of the spectrum is basically being discarded and the new red and green photons are sent down the pipe, to be recombined with the blue in the room. What this means is that you aren't actually getting "natural" light, you are getting 3 wavelengths, remixed to look white, just like "white" LEDs.
What's interesting about this is that because it's mostly using the UV bits of the spectrum, this collector here could maybe be placed over a standard light pipe and give you extra light on top. Since neither of these actually need the IR, you could even use that for heating water, too (although I don't know how you'd separate it...)
Find out more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_window