High-efficiency confocal paraboloids coupler design for natural light illumination systems

•For collecting sunlight for indoor lighting, coupler to reduce the number of fibers is needed.•In the coupler, the prism optical structures and paraboloids is used to change the direction of light and compress it.•The coupling efficiency is higher than previously designed couplers.•Moreover, the us...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Solar energy 2020-01, Vol.195, p.129-137
Main Authors: Whang, Allen Jong-Woei, Chen, Yi-Yung, Yang, Tsai-hsien, Lin, Yi-Lin, Tseng, Wei-Chieh, Chen, Hsi-Chi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Confocal
Coupler
Couplers
Design
Energy research
Illumination
Light
Light sources
Microscopes
Natural light illumination system
Natural lighting
Parabolic bodies
Paraboloids
Renewable energy
Solar energy
Sunlight
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Summary:•For collecting sunlight for indoor lighting, coupler to reduce the number of fibers is needed.•In the coupler, the prism optical structures and paraboloids is used to change the direction of light and compress it.•The coupling efficiency is higher than previously designed couplers.•Moreover, the using area is smaller than previously designed couplers. Recently, natural light illumination has become a hot topic in renewable energy research. Natural light illumination systems (NLISs) are used to guide sunlight for indoor illumination. The collector of NLISs is Lightbrick which consists of multi-prism. This paper proposes a novel design of confocal paraboloids couplers, which are important optical devices for NLISs. The coupler is designed with a prism optical structure and confocal paraboloids to collect a significant amount of inlet light from Lightbrick and compress it to one outlet light source. The prism structure causes the inlet light direction to coincide with a previous inlet light source, and the confocal paraboloid structure compresses two inlet light sources into one outlet. This newly designed confocal paraboloids coupler has high coupling efficiency, and its volume is smaller when the sunlight collection area is larger.
ISSN:0038-092X
1471-1257
DOI:10.1016/j.solener.2019.11.059