화학공학소재연구정보센터
Solar Energy, Vol.195, 129-137, 2020
High-efficiency confocal paraboloids coupler design for natural light illumination systems
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.