Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Texas A&M students will showcase a device that can transport natural light into the interior of buildings at a national sustainability design competition on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. later this month.
The system, designed with Liliana Beltrán, a recently promoted associate professor of architecture, was constructed and installed to illuminate a faux office space inside a rail car at the College of Architecture’s Digital Fabrication Facility, located at Texas A&M’s Riverside Campus.
Utilizing an outdoor light collector, the apparatus dubbed, "Horizontal Hybrid Solar Light Pipe: An Integrated System of Daylight and Electric Light," funnels sunlight from the collector through a pipe of highly reflective material into a simulated office space in the rail car.
The pipe will be Texas A&M's entry in the "P3: People, Prosperity, and the Planet Student Design Competition for Sustainability," an annual contest sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The contest is part of the EPA's April 24 and 25 sixth annual National Sustainable Design Expo, a gathering of professional scientists, engineers and business leaders.
The expo showcases the work of "P3" student teams that develop innovative design solutions for addressing sustainability-related issues such as alternative energy technologies; collection, purification and distribution of water; agricultural practices to reduce pesticide runoff; and new technologies for green buildings.
The event also provides a forum for government, nonprofit and business communities to demonstrate their diverse approaches to sustainability.
The Aggie group is one of 41 that received a one-year, $10,000 grant from the EPA "to develop an idea focused on benefiting people, promoting prosperity, and protecting the planet through an innovative design to address challenges to sustainability in both the developed and developing world," states the contest website.
"Our goal is to use natural light and reduce the need for electric lighting in buildings," said Beltrán, the project's principal investigator.
"With an efficient design and intelligent use of materials, it will be possible to passively introduce adequate light levels to illuminate areas between 15 to 40 feet from the perimeter of a building," she wrote in the project proposal.
The pipe also uses high-efficiency electric light sources such as light-emitting diodes and sulfur lamps.
Beltrán and Texas A&M team members will exhibit a scale model of their device on the National Mall for the April 23 competition and for public exposition on April 24 and 25.
José Fernández-Solis, assistant professor of construction science and the project’s co-principal investigator, is also making the trip. He directed the construction of the simulated office space at the Riverside Campus.
Beltrán said students are planning to set up a live webcast from their booth on the National Mall, where they will also showcase a live feed from their Riverside Campus project site.
A jury will pick the contest's top six entries and award up to $75,000 for winning teams to further their designs, implement them in the field and move them to the marketplace.
To develop the lighting system, the Aggie team:
A light guide, designed to move the maximum amount of collected sunlight into the simulated office space, is a key component of the student’s light system design.
Sunlight is captured by the guide, which includes a relatively small piece of glass resembling a small window, about 52 inches wide by 11 inches deep, said Beltran. The rest of the guide is a rectangular box the glass sits upon.
"The sunlight collection is maximized with very complex ray tracing computer programs, where we trace 10,000 rays or more and observe how each ray of the sun will be entering the tube," said Beltrán. "All the light guide's surfaces, especially on the front part, have a series of angles with reflectors, all shooting sunlight through the shaft."
The Aggie design's passive features have advantages over active light guides that require more maintenance, such as mechanical systems which that track the sun, she said.
"With our system, you install it, seal it, and it's there. All you have to do is clean the glass on the top, but if you use self-cleaning glass, you wouldn't even need to do that," she said.
After the light travels through the tube's highly reflective surface, made of a polymeric film with 99.3% reflectivity, it is spread into the simulated office space through a new daylight diffusing film developed by 3M, which is embedded, said Beltran, with special patterns to spread the light at a wide angle.
Beltrán and students will measure the illuminance delivered by the pipe with miniature light meters set on tables in the faux office, a space that's 75% the size of an actual office area.
The pipe, she said, stems from an idea she initially developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, that was further developed at Texas A&M by Betina Martins, one of Beltrán’s former students who now teaches at the Monterrey Institute in Mexico. Martins earned a Master of Science in Architecture degree from Texas A&M in 2005.
Another MSARCH former student, Kapil Uppadhyaya, also helped with the light pipe. He earned his degree in 2008.
The Horizontal Hybrid Solar Light Pipe has been a multidisciplinary project involving students from Texas A&M’s environmental design, construction science and electrical engineering, said Beltrán; the electrical engineering students will be installing the project's electric lighting and dimming controls.
For more on the EPA contest, visit http://epa.gov/ncer/p3
A link to the live feed of the project from Washington will be available on Beltrán's webpage, http://archone.tamu.edu/lbeltran, and the project's home page, http://archone.tamu.edu/epap3.
- Posted: March 29, 2010 -
