Sunlight,necessary and important but since the invention of electricity and our busy daily life in offices and colleges we could hardly found some time to spend in sun. So Anton Harfmann, Associate Dean and Professor of Architecture and Interior Design, and Jason Heikenfeld, Professor of Electrical Engineering, have collaborated on a project that could bring natural daylight to us in the offices.Offices are usually occupied during daytime hours, and natural sunlight delivers a spectrum of light that’s most conducive to productivity and psychological well-being.

Hence, it makes much more sense to have as much natural lighting as possible during the duration of office hours. Unfortunately, that is not very easy to execute since not every office has a window, and even where there are windows, the most sunlight these offices get throughout the day is for an interval of a few hours or so, because of the movement of the sun throughout the day.

Picture an array of tiny lenses

that can redirect sunlight towards any interior room of a building. Even better, the lenses focus light onto any small location for lighting a specific area of the room.The progress in the field of electrofluidics by the researchers in university of cincinnati ,this technology can be seen in coming future.

What makes this technology even more flabbergasting is that this Smart Light does not consume any net electricity but instead, offers the possibility of using excess light to generate additional electricity. 

How this lighting works is pretty simple. What we would need is transom windows with electrofluidic (EF) cells embedded in them. Light rays enter the building through these arrays of electrofluidic (EF) cells in the windows. This light is then directed up to the ceiling for general room lighting. Concentrated task lighting can also be achieved by arranging the electrofluidic cells in such a way as to focus more light on to specially-designed fixtures. 

Excess light that remains unused by all the rooms is then redirected to a central location for storage. The room lighting is user-controlled through a smartphone app that communicates with the WiFi-enabled array.These cells essentially contain a droplet of transparent fluid – just a few millimeters in size – charged negatively. This fluid acts like a lens when a small voltage is applied to one or more sides of the cell, changing the shape of the droplet. 

It can then focus the incoming light in any direction. Tiny photovoltaic cells are the source of electricity in this case. These are so small in size that they only have the capacity to absorb about 10% of the light. But this is enough to produce the negligible amount of voltage that the electrofluidic cells need.

 

The voltage is applied sporadically. But according to Dr. Harfmann, the cells would need refreshing every few minutes, in order to retain their shapes and to adapt to changing light conditions caused by the movement of the Sun in the sky during the day. The researchers have tested EF cells on a small prototype array of about 6 square centimeters.Harfmann and Heikenfeld have a brilliant suggestion to make that  let’s direct the excess sunlight to a centralized place where it can be concentrated and then passed on to photovoltaic cells. The result of this practice is that electricity can be generated  and later sold or can be stored in batteries for later use. The heat derived from concentration of sunlight can be used to heat up space or to heat water. 

Researchers expect to have made a working prototype within a year or two. If they manage to find enough investors who are willing to fund this project, we just might see this technology commercially available in a period as less as three years.

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