Innovative light collimator with afocal lens and total internal reflection lens for daylighting system

Abstract

This research presents a novel design of the collimator, which uses total internal reflection (TIR), convex, and concave lenses for the natural light illumination system (NLIS). The concept of the NLIS is to illuminate building interiors with natural light, which saves energy consumption. The TIR lens is used to collimate the light, and convex and concave lenses are used to converge the light to the required area. The results have shown that the efficiency in terms of achieving collimated light using the proposed collimator at the output of the light collector is better than that of a previous system without a collimator.

A freeform collimator lens design for the Natural Light Illumination System

“…To verify the performance of the collimator lens, we used one million rays in the simulation. According to equation (15), 14 the efficiency ratio of the collimator can be expressed as …”

“…There are studies on collimators for Lightbricks. 14 They propose a combination of convex and concave lenses. The light is compressed by the confocal of the convex lens and the concave lens.…”

A Review of Daylighting System: For Prototype Systems Performance and Development

“…Active daylighting system uses tracking technology to collect sunlight. After concentration or compression, the sunlight is transmitted through the optical fiber, light pipe or free space [105]. The technology transmitted through the optical fiber is also called Fiber Daylighting System [32,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][47][48][49][50]52,[101][102][103][104][106][107][108].…”