Sunlight option for workers in dark

Last Modified: 02 Feb 2007
By: Sally Gould

Offices which never see natural light may have sunlight piped in using solar panels and fibre optic cables, scientists have found.

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Academics at the University of Edinburgh's engineering school enjoy the first building in Britain to have used a technology that pumps sunlight into rooms that may otherwise literally never have seen the light of day.

The building was designed to be comfortable and environmentally sustainable.

It runs largely on the solar powered energy it generates - and was a natural candidate to use this new way of capturing the sun ray's to light rooms.

Developed in Sweden and called Parans, the technology is the creation of engineers at the Chalmers University in Gothenburg.

They created panels that, when tilted upwards, collect sunlight as it hits.

The light then flows into flexible optical fibres that transport it down into any part of a building.

Prisms are used in each room to scatter the sunlight.

The natural light can't be stored and used later - so the sunlight you get inside is the same as the sunlight hitting the panels outside.

At night, or on overcast days, buildings still need artificial light, but, its supporters say, that's the idea.

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