Heliostats… Bringing Light to the Core
One of the things I love about the revolution in technologies at the moment is the shift from Brute Force approaches to problems, based on cheap energy and resources to smarter design based on minimising energy and resource use.
The ingenuity of these approaches were often thought up in another era.
In an age gone by when candles and lighting oil were expensive, Victorian England Buildings, used light wells to illuminate the insides of their buildings.
Through the innovations in sky tracking technologies from telescopes and solar energy applications, we are now seeing a return to this solutions in the form of heliostats sunlight collectors.
The basic design is a rooftop tracking light collector follows the sun across the sky and through a combination of precision optics and fibre network can pump that light to the centre of a building.
source: http://archrecord.construction.com
There’s a bunch more technologies summarised at this site on internal lighting technologies, including light reflectors, heilostats and light shelves.
source: daylighting systems
Coupled with good design for new builds, and implementing these were possible we all might have a day in the sun.