May 23, 2013
Catching some rays
First-year planning student wins environment award for simple technology that harnesses sunlight to brighten our homes and offices.
It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while someone actually does build a better mousetrap. For James Coleman, a first-year student in Waterloo’s School of Planning, it wasn’t mice that his invention aimed to catch, but sunlight.
James Coleman, first-year student in University of Waterloo's School of Planning
By building a new, simple, cheap and sustainable way to harness sunlight for our homes and offices he’s landed in the spotlight of Waterloo’s entrepreneurial community.
Coleman’s idea, which he debuted in a pitch to judges at the Faculty of Environment’s 2103 Jack Rosen Memorial Award for Environmental Innovation , is brilliant in its simplicity. The awards are a Dragon’s Den style competition where budding environmental entrepreneurs pitch their ideas about how to solve an environmental challenge and get feedback from a panel of expert judges.
He calls it SunRays, and it involves capturing natural sunlight using, “a magnifying glass type of lens,” Coleman explains. The light captured by the lens is then transmitted through a standard fibre optic cable to an output somewhere where a traditional electric light would be used.
100 per cent sustainable
Coleman doesn’t want to go into too much detail about the process because he does have some plans to commercialize it. What is important to know is that the SunRays system is 100 percent natural and sustainable. Of course the limitation being that the technology only works on sunny days. But just think of how many times indoor lights are used during daylight hours.
If the idea is so simple, easy and practical, why hasn’t anyone else thought of it?
“I don’t know,” says Coleman modestly.
The win netted Coleman $1,000 to help develop his project. Since the pitch, he has also been working to commercialize the idea -- beginning with the patent process.
“My next step is the prototype,” says Coleman. “I have been working on several different configurations with sketches and simple tests, in an attempt to find the most efficient one, in terms of both costs and light output. Once I have found the best system I’ll be looking into a patent here in Canada, and eventually the States too. In the meantime, I have had a very generous friend offer his backyard shed as a ‘testing facility’.”
