Category

Region

CAGE-ABLE

CAGE-ABLE

Category
Daylight investigations - Region 4: Asia and Oceania

Students
Lau Wing Lam
Leung Hoi Tung
Leung Kok Yan
Ho Chi Fung

School
The university of Hong Kong

Country
China

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Behind the flourishing image of a lot of developed countries and cities, wealth inequality has been worsen over the years. Due to the ridiculously high property price of certain regions, some people have been living in subdivided units or even “cage houses”. In order to maximize numbers of “room” provided, distribution of natural light is often not a major concern by the property owners.

Natural light plays an important role in our daily lives. Other than the illuminance provided for our activities, it also creates warmth and connection with the nature. It also benefits us in various ways. Improving our sleep patterns, elevating our concentration and productivity, to name but a few. Natural light is vital not only for our physical, but also psychological wellbeing.

Our design, CAGE-ABLE, emphasizes on the equality of the amount of natural light to be received by the residents of subdivided units and “cage homes”. With our product, we hope to introduce more sunlight into those units in a simplistic, affordable and flexible way, lifting the residents’ wellbeing.

CAGE-ABLE makes use of optical fibers to transmit sunlight from the outside-facing windows to the interior of the units by total internal reflection. They have solid cores of optically denser glass surrounded by an optically less dense cladding. The light ray passing through the inner core is reflected back instead of being refracted to the rarer cladding. In this way, natural sunlight can be transmitted into each divided unit, even with complicated division on interior space.

In the view to maximize the amount of sunlight collected, a convex lens would be used to converge light into a specific focus point. It can enlarge the surface area covered on the window for collecting sunlight, while converging light with higher intensity into the optical fiber system.

At the end of the fiber system, a half-sphere-shaped container would be placed with water filled. Water is a cheap and easy-to-get medium for effective diffusion of sunlight. Light given out from the “sunlight bulb” would be softer while not bringing too much heat due to an effective cooling effect of water.

At the same time, sustainability has been a topic of interest that has aroused public attention worldwide. By replacing artificial light used within the units with natural light, CAGE-ABLE promotes sustainability by reducing carbon emission during the generation of electricity.

With simple materials and installation required, CAGE-ABLE can be placed by customers themselves for a brighter living condition, better mental well-being, lower electricity cost and carbon emission, impacting not only the individuals but also the society.

Our design still encounters certain minor limitations at the current stage, which might be solved with future development process. For example, even with the use of convex lens to enlarge surface area on windows, the amount of sunlight collected might still be inadequate, especially for time like evening. Due to the moving nature of sunlight direction, our design with fixed position would be less efficient than those which can be automatically adjusted to receive more sunlight. However, our design is limited to the current version after considering potential cost as our target users are mostly underprivileged.