Orthogonal incidence method for efficient sunlight collection from asymmetric light couplers in tree-structured light guiding systems

摘要

Directly transporting sunlight for use in indoor lighting applications is an efficient way to utilize solar energy. This study proposes a tree-structured light guiding system (TLGS) to collect sunlight and transport it for indoor illumination. The use of asymmetric light couplers in a TLGS increases the amount of accumulated sunlight. An analytic ray tracing model of the asymmetric coupler is proposed to present the angle and height distributions of the propagated rays. The cutoff angles were derived, and this cutoff condition was used to determine which rays are able to travel through the coupling region. In simulations, the couplers with coupling angles (θ_(coup)) of 30° and 50° were conducted, and the large θ_(coup) coupler provided high coupling efficiency (0.450). The orthogonal incidence method was adopted to increase coupling efficiency (0.646), and subsequently the amount of accumulated sunlight. The amount of accumulated sunlight in a TLGS was increased by 44%.