What is it?
Sun 2 Fiber- a project focused on capturing, concentrating, and transporting sunlight through a fiber optic cable to light up window-less rooms and even purify water without electricity. I designed, modelled, and tested this system.
How it works
The Sun2Fiber project is a renewable energy project, whose main goal is to create a waveguide that captures sunlight and transports that light through fiber optic cable. This has applications for solar thermal electricity production, greenhouse heating, and solar daylighting. This study used COMSOL Multiphysics modeling software to find the optimal anti-reflective coating (ARC) as a cladding for a standard slab waveguide, to aid in transmitting sunlight efficiently. The system consisted of a substrate (the beginning of the slab waveguide) as the bottom layer, a graded-index ARC as the middle layer, and air as the top layer. In order to optimize the thin film, various parameters were tested in order to create a system that not only was optimized for the Sun2Fiber project, but could easily be modified to find the most cost effective cladding (ARC) possible for any particular project. This was done by looking at the effects of varying wavelengths of light, angles of incidence, the number of layers in the graded index antireflective coating (8, 16, 32, etc.), and the thickness of each layer individually, a byproduct of changing the number of layers.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.