On 'You and Yours', BBC R4, lunchtime on Thursday, my wife heard an item about a professor who'd invented a new type of low-energy light that was very bright and came on instantly with no warm up period. I found a brief reference to the item on the BBC web site, but couldn't get the 'listen again' feature to work. Did anyone hear it? If so, what was it about; was it something new, or just a re-hash of existing technology?
I think it's just a better/larger LED lamp, in an interview I saw on breakfast TV the engineer being interviewed was suggesting that it's a few years away yet before being available "on the high street".
Perhaps that's where they should first be used... street lighting.
From google news/science
It's a way of making high power LEDs more cheaply, making better/larger LED lamps economically viable.
Andy
They can't be much worse than high pressure sodium or mercury.
Article here:
There's at least one US city alredy using them, less light pollution and easier to point the light to where it's required.
High pressure sodium can be pretty good. Not to be confused with ordinary sodium.
If the colour was OK, I'd take half as efficient as a current LEDs over CFLs any day. And you don't need to evacuate the county when they blow either.
R.
Well they are on the march - a municipality is going over to LED lighting and you can now get a car with LED headlamps (both in the US) - make them cheaper and Bob's your uncle (or, in this case, me)
Electrochemical things that produce light and light at pretty high efficiencies - are not rare. However that is a LONG step from a reliable, nice spectrum,, long lifetime cheap light source.
Remember ho long edison took to find a filament that dint burn out?
Its no dfferent from OLEDS - which are the general brand of such chemicals.
Ive seen some amazing stuff done my a startup. Very good spectrum, very good efficiency. They went bust. To mke a hermetically sealed unit at low cost wit a decent lifetime is a completely different matter
About a year after he read about Swan inventing the incandescent lamp IIRC
Neither of those actually means the 'colour' is ok, though. I've seen pro LED lamps used for filming where it still isn't. Of course that's not to say it won't be one day.
I do wonder about using them for car headlights - HID units are pretty good already. And not that expensive.
It's all about maintenance. LED MTBF is > car active nigh liftime mileage.
Wonder what the life is from high output LEDs? My experience of driving Luxons hard is not very long.
When I was at Edison's summer home in Fort Myers, Florida in the eighties, they were claiming that some of the bulbs in use in the house were his originals. Gave about 2 watt equivalent light output and filaments looked like bent six-inch nails.
Tom
Many thanks everyone. Most helpful.
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