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Feature from Environmental Building News
October 1, 1999
Daylighting--Part 2:
Bringing Daylight Deeper into Buildings
IMAGINE A DEVICE THAT SITS ON the roof of a building and focuses sunlight into cables the size of electrical wire. These cables are run through walls and ceiling plenums into light fixtures that beam natural, full-spectrum daylight deep into a building’s interior.
Sound like science fiction? It’s not. One such product, the Himawari®, has been commercially available for nearly 15 years, and more than 1,000 of these (expensive) fiber-optic daylighting systems have been installed in Japan and Western Europe.
In the U.S., research on cost-effective fiber-optic daylight distribution is still in its infancy, though many of the components and technologies, including optical fibers used for electric lighting, are well developed and already finding widespread use for specialized lighting applications.
The idea of using special devices to distribute daylight or light from a remote source has been around for a while. Ships in the 1800s were sometimes fitted with special prisms that channeled daylight down into the ship’s hold. In 1880, William Wheeler patented a mechanism for distributing light throughout a building using a network of pipes—though he did not succeed with implementing the concept.
This article takes a look at strategies for bringing daylight deeper into buildings. Last month we addressed daylighting with windows and conventional skylights—strategies that have been shown to boost worker performance in offices, increase test performance in schools, and increase sales in retail establishments. This month, we’ll look at strategies for increasing the penetration of daylight. In addition to high-tech fiber-optic systems, we’ll examine tubular skylights, which are finding widespread use in the residential market, as well as some high-performance commercial skylights that rely on highly reflective light wells or sun-tracking mirrors to boost performance.
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