A Brief Review of Solar Indoor Lighting System Integrated with Optofluidic Technologies

Indoor lighting system incorporating daylighting effectively provides potential energy savings as well as meaningful spatial and temporal variation in illuminance beneficial to human well-being and performance. Integration of the tunable liquid prisms driven by optofluidic technologies will further improve the solar indoor lighting systems to achieve better illumination performance and higher solar energy utilization efficiency. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art investigations over different aspects of the solar indoor lighting system enhanced by optofluidic liquid prisms, including (1) theoretical background, design, fabrication, and operation of liquid prisms, (2) advances in solar collectors and solar trackers, and (3) major tools for indoor lighting simulation and ray-tracing simulation. These studies form a solid foundation for future solar indoor lighting systems integrated with optofluidic technologies. The prospective study will focus on laboratory and on-site testing of the integrated system.