New High Performance LED Lighting Systems

It is reported that AeroLED sponsored a media lunch today at AirVenture 2009 to introduce their new line of high performance LED lighting solutions. Based on super-bright LED technology, which is fully replaceable with original lighting systems, pronounced “aerolead” the company produces retrofit and OEM lighting options.

Nate Calvin of AeroLED reported the company’s product is a direct replacement for existing incandescent, or “legacy systems” products now in the field, including a replacement for the GE 4509 landing light bulb. Components include options for replacement of navigation and strobe units as well.

Calvin said all components exceed FAR requirements for lumen output. Stating that incandescent systems operate in the 2500 Kelvin range whereas the AeroLED product operates in the 6500 Kelvin range, providing a more white colored and intense light output. The lighting is directional for the strobe application, more closely matching the diminishing requirements from horizontal to vertical plane of the FAR’s. The units are also on the order of 4 times lighter than traditional systems with significantly lower amperage draw.

Initial products were offered to the experimental and homebuilt markets to facilitate a positive cash flow and to support FAR 23 and TSO testing requirements for certified systems. An added benefit to this business approach was the opportunity to receive feedback from the initial customer base. AeroLED also allowed OEM customers to provide opinions for improvements. Calvin stated that all the feedback was considered key to current product line development, resulting in a superior product.

The Pulsar series is the first all LED nav and strobe light combination according to Calvin. The units are ruggedly constructed having gone through complete and thorough vibration and abuse testing, including installation on aircraft equipped with diesel engines that destroyed incandescent bulbs in as little as 10 hours. The units are hermetically sealed and are displayed under water to demonstrate their durability for all weather operation. Calvin quipped that the underwater display was a bit “cheesy” but proved to be an eye catcher and brought people over to investigate. Testing on the units has indicated a life expectancy of around 60,000 hours, well beyond most airframe lifetimes. While not specifically stating a price for the components, Calvin said they were comparable to costs of traditional lighting systems when replacement bulbs and power supplies over the life of the aircraft were factored in.

All AeroLED units have built in overtemp protection and offer very low RF emmisions and will not interfere with radio operations. Operating on 9-36 volts the systems do not dim, as incandescent lights do, at lower voltage levels and deliver the same lumen output regardless of input voltage.

AeroLED is committed to providing a see and avoid product. The company believes, and is receiving encouraging reports, that their system allows much greater visibility at a longer range than any other system currently available. All systems have wigwag capability allowing spotting far in advance of typical legacy systems and AeroLED systems are more visible in daytime than other systems. PMA certification is expected by year end.

Mini LED Camping Light

A camping lantern, nicessity for home use or car camping or backpacking alike, which is so small and light it fits right on your keychain via a carabiner. Weighing under an ounce and measuring one by two inches, the LED Mini is a perfect back-up light. Throw this in your pocket and forget all about it until the sun dips below the craggy peaks and darkness engulfs you. Then turn it on and light up your tent; though it’s small, it outputs 3.5 lumens and is supposedly capable of lighting up an entire tent. Luckily, since it’ll be most at home in the backcountry, it will likely just have to provide enough juice for a slimmed-down, ultralight solo or two-man.

If you find yourself in a sticky situation where mere light simply won’t bail you out, the LED Mini also includes a strobe setting for catching the attention of other campers. It can run continuously for 25 hours (or 50 on strobe) with the two included 3 volt CR2032 batteries. It may not provide a spotlight for your acoustic guitar solo, but for $6.99 it’ll certainly be a valuable addition to your gear closet.

Tiny LED Serve in Automobile

It is reported that a tiny new LED power source could serve in applications ranging from automotive interiors to architectural fixtures to television backlights.

The device, measuring a scant 3.5 x 3.5 x 1.2 mm, could carve out a special niche for itself in hybrid vehicles and electric cars, where packaging is tight and power budgets are tighter, its manufacturer says.

“Due to its small size, you can put just one or two of them in an appliance and there’s still plenty of light,” says Rodney Bailey, vice president of optoelectronic components for TT electronics OPTEK Technology, maker of the new power source. “It’s attractive for electric hybrids because those vehicles need to use the bare minimum of current.”

Known as the OVS5MxBCR4 Series LED package, the new product dissipates a half a Watt of power, but is approximately half the size of other half-Watt power sources. Moreover, its low power-draw means it needs no thermal management, Optek engineers say.

“There’s not enough power coming out of it to merit thermal management,” Bailey says.

Optek is positioning the device in a “sweet spot” between 1W packages – which draw twice as much power and need thermal management – and very small devices that don’t offer sufficient light intensity for many interior applications. The company says the device is already been designed into several forthcoming hybrid electric vehicle programs for interior lighting applications. There, the low power requirements are making it an attractive alternative to incandescent bulbs, which can draw as much as 6A. In contrast, the OVS5MxBCR4 Series LED package uses about one-tenth of that. The use of the device in such applications is consistent with a trend toward growing use of LEDs in the auto industry.

Optek says power dissipation for the device at 150 mA is 0.48W for white, warm white and blue LEDs, 0.51W for a green deice and 0.33W for red, amber and yellow packages. Luminous flux for white, warm white, blue and green LEDs is 25, 25, 6 and 25 lm, respectively.

Applications include automotive interiors and exteriors, architectural indoor and outdoor lighting, mobile appliances and display backlighting, especially in televisions.

As the time goes by, the tiny LED should be popular in applications where they need good light.

Philips Find Ways to Closes Yellow LED Gap

The yellow light-emitting diode (LED) gap always trouble Philips till now. Recently, researchers with Philips Lumileds (San Jose, CA) have developed a monochromatic nitride diode to closes the gap. The phosphor-converted (PC) amber LED demonstrated by Regina Mueller-Mach and her colleagues uses the down-conversion of blue light from an indium-gallium-nitride (InGaN) LED to longer-wavelength light by a phosphor, in a variation of a well-established process for producing cold or warm white light from blue LED light (see also “Fluorescent microspheres create white-light LEDs”).

Monochromatic light-emitting diodes cover a large part of the visible spectrum with high efficiency. For blue light, nitride diodes achieve external quantum efficiencies in excess of 65%. For red light, phosphor diodes achieve efficiencies of approximately 50%. However, so far no highly efficient monochromatic LEDs have been available for the “yellow gap” at around 560 nm.

Leveraging previous research on warm white light, the researchers succeeded in down-converting blue LED light into monochromatic amber light with a 595 nm wavelength and a color purity of 98.7%. The external quantum efficiency of the PC amber LED is at 30-40%, depending on temperature. Compared to direct amber LEDs, the new PC amber LED is two to five times as bright. It achieves a light output of 70 lumens at a 350 mA current.

There are numerous applications for the LUXEON Rebel PC Amber LED. It can be used in yellow traffic lights or signals as well as in cars’ turn signals or warning lights for construction sites. They could also be used in consumer electronics and their high efficiency makes them inexpensive.

LED Street Lights Testing in California

The LED Street Lights Testing was hold in California. As we all know that high-efficiency white LED street lights will cut energy use by 30 percent to 60 percent every year.

Garden Grove is testing four 250-watt LED street lights on Civic Center Drive at Acacia Parkway, said Senior Analyst Chau Vu. Whether the city will switch over to LED will depend on how this testing goes, she said.

“In the next six months to one year, we’ll look at how much wattage these lights use up,” she said. “If it does what they say it can do, then it’s definitely worth it for the city. These lights can save a lot in terms of energy and money.”

LED lights are also easy to maintain because they last longer, Vu said. The downside is that they cost significantly more. While a regular street light costs $300 a fixture, LED lights cost about $2,000 a fixture.

LED lights are constructed with 100 percent recycled aluminum, contain no mercury or lead and do not require hazardous waste disposal handling. The city of Los Angeles is testing 100-watt LED lights.

Garden Grove was one of the first cities in the state to install LED lights on traffic signals. These test lights are manufactured by a company called Leotek and were donated to the city by South Coast Lighting.

So, if the tests prove successful, the city should do their best to change all street lights to LED.

LED Light for City Night

Nighttime commuters may notice a bluish glow coming from the ten pairs of street lights lighting their way. Mounted 40 feet above the traffic, similar to those found in stoplights and laser pointers, the lights are not bulbs but rows of LEDs.

“This is the first interstate highway to be lit with LED lighting,” said Kevin Orth, director of sales for Wisconsin-based Beta LED, which makes the lights. LEDs are coming to the streets of Eden Prairie, where officials are replacing the city’s old street lights, and already illuminate the parking lot of a Cub Foods store in St. Paul’s Phalen neighborhood, which last month became the second certified energy-efficient supermarket in the country.

For large projects like these, the long-run savings in energy and maintenance, as well as the environmental concerns, generally outweigh the short-run costs.

This growing use of LEDs by government and industry marks a move away from traditional incandescent bulbs and, more recently, the more-efficient fluorescent lights that have come on the market. Although LEDs cost more to manufacture than other lighting options, they consume a small fraction of the energy of even fluorescent bulbs and last 25 to 30 years.

Lighting still accounts for as much as 20 percent of electricity used around the world, so improving lighting technology by even a little bit can lead to great savings in energy and reductions in greenhouse gases.

How to Make an Old House into a Modern

This artical shows you how to push a 1920s house into a modern, low-carbon age. The last few touches – appliances and rare light bulbs.

After spending the past year reducing the home’s heating bills by adding stacks of insulation, the owner has now turned her attention to slashing her electricity needs. She buy electricity from Good Energy which is a 100% renewable electricity supplier, but she would like to reduce our dependence on it, as all electricity is expensive – green or not. She monitor her energy usage with weekly measurements taken directly from both the gas and electricity utility and currently the house consumes 8kWh of electricity every day.

As part of her drive to save eneergy, She has reviewed the efficiency of all of her electrical appliances. Fridge freezers are significant consumers of electricity in the average house because they are switched on 365 days a year. As she was old, she recently replaced it with an A-rated one to minimise energy usage. Their television is an old-fashioned boxy cathrode ray tube, which is quite energy-hungry, consuming 300 watts per hour when on. The plan – when she has the money – is to change it over to a LCD type. They’ll plan their purchase with a great site called Sust-It which you can use to determine the energy cost per year of new tellies and other products.

What else? Well, she changed most of our conventional light bulbs to energy-savers several years ago. That was easy with standard bulbs, so now she is replacing the more obscure ones.

The garage security floodlight was rated at an energy-guzzling 500 watts – the equivalent of around 50 standard energy-saving bulbs. Although it produced an instant bright light , it was repeatedly set off by animals wandering into the garden at night. So she found a low-energy bulb from B&Q which, although less than half as bright, consumes just 18 watts and reaches full brightness within a few seconds. B&Q now sells a better version using an incandescent bulb for instant bright white light, but after a few seconds the more efficient but slower compact fluorescent bulb takes over.

Continuing outside, our garden lights used to consume only 6 watts each, but having eight of them she was determined to replace them with a more efficient option. Compact fluorescent bulbs don’t exist for such a small wattage so an LED light was the obvious choice. She has now replaced each of them with a very bright 1 watt LED version which nicely lights up the path to the house. A timer ensures the overall energy consumption is minimised.

She has used LED technology inside too. Earlier in the year she bought several Deltech LED bulbs from ebulbshop.com and was very impressed with its brightness and warm-white colour. It matches the incandescent GU10 bulbs (one of the most common spotlight-style fittings) very well and most importantly it has the same physical size, so it fits in her bathroom ceiling’s recessed bulb-holders. These GU10 LED bulbs consume just 5 watts each but come close to the light output from their 50 watt incandescent equivalents. They won’t pay for themselves for more than 10 years because they’re so expensive up-front, so I justify the LEDs on the grounds that their carbon payback is immediate.

Salmon DNA LED Bulbs

It is reported that the latest LED breakthrough comes from the University of Connecticut, and it uses salmon DNA to create very long-lasting white LEDs (though they can be tuned to other colors). By now a lot of cool LED technology still needs to make its way from the lab to the store, it’s exciting to see that engineers are still finding new ways to squeeze more performance out of those semiconductor diodes.

Fluorescent dyes (two different ones, spaced between 2 and 10 nanometers from each other) are added to the DNA molecules, which are then spun into nanofibers. These are very durable because DNA is a particularly strong polymer (it has to be!) (they should last 50 times longer than acrylic, for example).

A LED emitting ultra-violet light is then coated with the DNA nanofibers: “When UV light is shined on the material, one dye absorbs the energy and produces blue light. If the other dye molecule is at the right distance, it will absorb part of that blue-light energy and emit orange light.” Using DNA has the benefit of orienting the dyes “in an optimum way for efficient [fluorescence energy transfer] to occur,” according to David Walt, a chemistry professor at Tufts University.

To tune the light quality, all you need to do is vary the ratios of dye. The light can be tuned from cool white to warm white, for example.

Unfortunately, numbers on how many lumens per watt these LEDs produce haven’t been released yet (though that might just be because they’re still improving them), so it’s not clear if the main benefit from these will be the longer life, or if the extra fine tuning will also mean better light quality than other white LED (like those that use quantum dots, for example), or if energy efficiency will also be superior. But it’s a new trick that will no doubt be useful. Maybe someday we’ll have a bit of DNA in our lights.

The Kast LED Task Light

The beautiful, sleek, yet simple design of the Kast light is complemented by its quarter-shaped array of two five-watt LED clusters which are precisely angled to deliver glare-free light projection.

Kast has been manufactured with sustainability in mind, using over 80 percent recyclable aluminum and steel, composed of 40 percent recycled material with 27 percent post-consumer recycled content, and 100 percent solvent free powder coat finishes. The LED light helps make the task light affordable to the user, offering an average rated life of 100,000 hours which is ten times greater than most compact fluorescent lamps. In addition, the LED diodes are nearly 25 percent more energy-efficient than comparable compact fluorescent technology.

This is the first year for the Green GOOD DESIGN Award. It is a specialized edition of the GOOD DESIGN Award program which was founded in 1950 by architects Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. The GOOD DESIGN Awards bestow international recognition on designers and manufacturers for advancing innovation and originality. The awards are presented by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The purpose of the Green GOOD DESIGN Award is to emphasize the importance of sustainable design and to develop a public awareness program to the international general public educating about which companies are doing the greatest job creating sustainable design for our world environments. The Green GOOD DESIGN Award received hundreds of submissions from over 40 nations. Only 105 products, programs, people, government, environmental planning, and architecture were selected as outstanding examples of Green Design.

The Kast(TM) LED task light by Details, a Steelcase company, recently received a 2009 Green GOOD DESIGN(TM) Corporate Award. This award sets the bar for outstanding examples of Green Design. The beautiful, sleek, yet simple design of the Kast light is complemented by its quarter-shaped array of two five-watt LED clusters which are precisely angled to deliver glare-free light projection.

Lighting Going Green

As the adoption of more energy-efficient light sources becomes more widespread in the coming years, the resulting energy savings naturally will increase. “LEDS are semiconductor light sources that produce directional light. Thus, the light is delivered precisely where it is needed so much less light is wasted as scattered light, and light pollution is reduced,” said Dr. Berit Wessler, Head of Innovation Management for OSRAM Opto Semiconductors (Regensburg,Germany). “LED light sources already consume much less electricity than most other conventional light sources.”

Light-emitting diodes have considerable potential for increases in brightness and efficiency, and can deliver even more potential energy savings than traditional light sources. Development work is ongoing and light-emitting diodes already are penetrating the general illumination sector.

The Imaging Source (Charlotte, N.C.) announces a new series of cost-effective LED lighting modules, which seamlessly integrate with The Imaging Source USB, FireWire and GigE cameras. Features include: very bright LEDs; direct connection to the camera; all parameters can be set via the shipped software, IC Capture and IC Imaging Control or by custom-built software; compatible with The Imaging Source USB, CCD, FireWire and GigE cameras. All cameras manufactured by The Imaging Source ship with IC Capture and IC Imaging Control.

As a result of CoolLED’s (Andover, Hampshire, U.K.) continuous development program, the company is pleased to announce the latest release of new LED wavelengths for its fluorescence excitation products. The new wavelengths are at 365, 380, 440, 470, 550, 615, 700 and 770 nm. These wavelengths are provided on LAMs (LED Array Modules) that can be interchanged within CoolLED’s modular fluorescence excitation sources and systems.The additions expand the wavelength range into the UV and IR regions. CoolLED offers its LED technology for wide-ranging applications. A total of 18 wavelengths now are available. CoolLED’s LAMs are arrays of LEDs that are actively cooled for the highest stability and intensity. Lifetime is measured in tens of thousands of “on” hours with no warm-up or cool-down periods required. There is very little reduction in intensity over lifetime. Switching is almost instantaneous.LED technology does not use hazardous materials.