High-Performance UVC LEDs Driving Spectroscopy Innovations

UVC LEDs are fast becoming the technology of choice for designers developing a new breed of spectroscopy devices that are smaller, less costly and more energy-efficient, while still delivering precise, real-time measurements. With efficiency and performance levels that rival traditional lamp-based systems, UVC LEDs are an integral component in new instruments for a range of applications, including high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), water-quality monitoring and process monitoring in the food and beverage industry. Granted, LEDs are an established technology, offering a small footprint, ease of alignment and enhanced end-user productivity. But adoption of earlier sapphire substrate UVC LEDs in the 250- to 280-nm range was relatively limited due to performance and reliability issues.

This LED Lightbulb Has A Swappable Core To Reduce Waste

The BrightYolk is an LED lightbulb with its own changeable internal lightbulb. A regular LED lightbulb might last for long enough for you to become a Gladwellian Outlier twice over, but once it’s dead, it’s dead, and you have to toss away the whole life-support unit that surrounds the tiny LED along with the LED itself. The BrightYolk, on the other hand, can be opened up like a flashlight, giving access to a much smaller "power module" that can be swapped out when the original expires. This way, you waste less plastic and fewer electronic components—assuming, that is, that the modular design doesn’t use more plastic to begin with, like a phone with a removable battery.

LEDs Could Replace Your Wi-Fi

Whenever you use Wi-Fi to text or download a Serial podcast, the data travels over radio waves. The trouble is that these waves occupy such a narrow pathway along the electromagnetic spectrum, which limits the available bandwidth for smartphones and other devices. “You can never create more spectrum,” says Harald Haas, a lead mobile communications researcher at the University of Edinburgh. If radio waves are like a crowded single-lane road, visible lightwaves are like a wide-open freeway. The solution for faster downloads is to take advantage of this larger swath through LED bulbs.

The debate on the benefits of LEDs intensifies

The American Medical Association Council on Science and Public Health recently released a report detailing the health impacts of light emitting diodes (LEDs) that emit excessive amounts of blue light. The Council reviewed the hazards of LEDs that emit heavy amounts of blue light; exposure to “blue-rich white light” can lead to increased risks for cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The report, titled Human and Environmental Effects of Light Emitting Diode Community Lighting, presents new information about the risks of exposure to LEDs, and also provides insight on the environmental downsides of LEDs — somewhat ironic findings given that LEDs have been championed as more environmentally sustainable lighting than traditional bulbs.

Five tips to remember before changing that light bulb

Become a light-bulb expert: 'How many people does it take to change a light bulb?' The answer? Just one — you, with the right safety tips. Here are five things to remember the next time you perform the simple household chore. 1 Turn it off: It may seem like common sense, but how many times have you screwed in a light bulb only to realize you didn't turn off the light switch? This is called 'hot swapping,' when you remove or replace an electrical component with electricity still running to that component. It's as dangerous as it sounds, according to Home Depot's how-to website, proreferral.com. Instead, turn off the light and wait 10 minutes before you switch out the bulb.

Granite Geek: LEDs Efficient, But Cause More Light Pollution

When a city replaces its old-fashioned streetlights with efficient LED lights, it can save a bundle of money on its electricity bills. But it can also dramatically increase light pollution, which is really unpleasant for astronomers and those among of us who like to do a little star-gazing on cloudless nights. The kind of light these LEDs emit can cloud our view of constellations. Granite Geek David Brooks throws some light—so to speak—on the unintended consequences of this efficiency measure in his column this week in The Concord Monitor, and he joined NHPR’s Peter Biello to discuss his findings.

AMA report affirms human health impacts from LEDs

A groundbreaking report recently released by the American Medical Association (AMA) Council on Science and Public Health affirms known and suspected impacts to human health and the environment caused by light emitting diodes (LEDs) that emit excessive amounts of blue light. The AMA report, titled "Human and Environmental Effects of Light Emitting Diode Community Lighting," unanimously approved by representatives of the Association's entire membership, supports concerns raised by the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) for more than five years. The report presents significant implications for the ongoing, worldwide transition to LEDs as the outdoor lighting technology of choice.

PG&E to covert 229 Atherton street lights to LEDs

Pacific Gas & Electric will spend two or three weeks converting 229 utility-owned street lights in Atherton to LEDs this summer, allowing the town to save on its utility bills. PG&E says the process will involve a bucket truck with one- or two-person crews and take only about 10 minutes per light. Town-owned lights will not be affected, but the town also has plans to convert its lights to LEDs in the near future. Residents may request the town install reflectors to redirect the light if needed.

Surface recombination in III-nitride LEDs: negligible or important?

There is ongoing interest in the fabrication of micro-pixel light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and LED arrays in view of their potential application in Li-Fi communication technology. Reduction of the LED dimensions necessary for this brings into play physical effects that have not been considered before as critical ones for the device performance. In particular, surface recombination has been known for a long time as an essential channel of carrier losses in AlGaInP-based LEDs, lowering their efficiency of the chip sizes as small as a few hundred microns. Surprisingly, this mechanism was never regarded as a valuable factor capable of affecting the efficiency of blue and green III-nitride LEDs.

Atlantic City to install 2,500 LEDs thanks to $2 million grant

Thanks to a $2,000,000 grant, Atlantic City could get a whole lot brighter.
Atlantic City announced that due to the grant approved by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, they can now convert about 2,500 street lights to energy efficient light fixtures, potentially becoming the first in the state to convert their entire street lighting system to LED. The LEDs will save the city $250,000 annually in energy costs and according to Mayor Don Guardian, could reduce crime, a city spokesman said in a news release.

 

A guide to understanding new light-bulb terms, LEDs and more

Anyone who has stood in confusion in the light-bulb aisle (and that’s most of us) knows that technology and the push to save energy are continuing to flip the script on home lighting options. The good news is the new bulbs are much more efficient than old-school incandescents. “The new types of light bulbs, LED in particular, let light-fixture designers create all kinds of lighting designs and fixture designs that they could never create before,” says Karman Hotchkiss, executive editor of Decor magazine. “There are a lot of new shapes out there. There are a lot of really artistic interpretations of lighting, things like sparkle and effects that designers couldn’t create with old-fashioned incandescent bulbs.”

LEDs to light up city streets

The Municipal Corporation is going to execute the energy-efficient LED street light project as a step towards making the city smart. The Punjab Municipal Infrastructure Development Company (PMIDC) has given its nod to the project with the proposal that a private firm, Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL), be hired for execution of the LED project. However, the MC has been asked to satisfy itself about the working of the company before signing an MoU and moving ahead with the project.

Achieving high current densities with novel organic LEDs

Over the past few decades, organic LEDs (OLEDs) have been extensively studied. These devices have promising properties (e.g., high electroluminescence efficiency, flexibility, light weight, and low manufacturing cost) and have thus found various applications, such as in flat-panel displays and solid-state lighting.1, 2 In modern OLEDs, highly conductive transport layers are used to reduce injection barriers and to allow low operation voltages.3–5 In these so-called pin-OLEDs, vertical current transport works efficiently within a stack size of about 100nm.

Understanding LEDs, new light-bulb terms

Anyone who has stood in confusion in the light-bulb aisle (and that's most of us) knows that technology and the push to save energy are continuing to flip the script on home lighting options. The good news is the new bulbs are much more efficient than old-school incandescents, and give designers the freedom to move beyond the standard bulb-lamp-fixture configuration. "The new types of light bulbs, LED in particular, let light-fixture designers create all kinds of lighting designs and fixture designs that they could never create before," says Karman Hotchkiss, executive editor of Decor magazine.

This Startup Is Building A Cellular Network For Your Lightbulb And Toaster

On a drizzly San Francisco afternoon in March, Ludovic Le Moan, 52, climbs to the roof of San Francisco’s stately public library. He’s there to check on a 5-foot pole equipped with a small antenna and a briefcase-size box. It’s one of 22 “base stations” his French startup, Sigfox, has placed throughout the city and one of 6,000 it operates across 18 countries as part of its improbable quest: building a wireless network that will cover at least 100 U.S. cities by year’s end and eventually span much of the planet.

Watch how to make a plasma ball out of a light bulb

If you've ever had aspirations to become a mad scientist, or just look like one, you not only need an impressive lab, but also fun and interesting gadgets to display. One such scientific-looking artifact is a plasma globe. These illuminated spheres use various noble gases with a high-voltage electrode to create beams of colored light that dance along the inside of the glass dome. While the first plasma lamp was invented by Nikola Tesla in 1892, inventor Bill Parker created the modern day plasma lamp design in 1971. They became a trendy collectible during the 1980s.

Aura Light introduces new architectural LED luminaire

Propel is the latest striking architectural LED luminaire from Aura Light that offers an exciting and colourful addition to offices and public spaces. This three part luminaire can be specified in any colour from the NCS* range and displayed in various positions to give the desired look to match the interior of any space, whilst offering excellent light levels and energy savings. The stylish and contemporary design of Propel can be used to simply blend in with a colour scheme, or as a creative focal point for new or modern refurbished rooms.

Upgrading Tesla Model X lighting with Ultra-Bright LEDs

Tesla’s Premium Upgrade Package for the Model X and Model S includes an assortment of technology advancements including the Bio Weapons air filtration system, and what the company describes as “Soft LED ambient interior lighting”. Illumination from the interior LED lighting is quite subtle and dim enough that one could argue that it provides little more than just a faint glow.

Why did Xiaomi make this lamp smart?

The Mi lamp consists of two rods that intersect each other and create an obtuse angle. How minimal. How lamp. It's all white except for a cord that's sunburnt orange. Mi lamp has four light settings — focus mode, read mode, child mode, and computer mode. These are controlled through Xiaomi's home app for iOS or Android. Cool, so that's the lamp. It has no other connected features. I hope you love toggling through lighting settings. The lamp will sell for 169 Yuan, or $26. I don't know why it's connected. Do you?

Exploring the Performance of LEDs Using Optical Feedback

Ongoing advancements in LED technology have resulted in the increased use of LED devices for both illumination and fluorescence excitation in microscopy as well as for macroscopical applications. These devices run much cooler and are more stable than incandescent and arc lamp sources. Although their “point intensity” (the radiant intensity per unit area of the source), as we refer to it in Cairn, may still not be as good as that for some arc lamps, it is still much higher than for incandescent sources. This is critical for efficient illumination in microscopy.

Consumers sour on milk exposed to LEDs

Display cases at grocery stores increasingly use light-emitting diode (LED) lighting, and that's bad news for milk drinkers. Cornell University researchers in the department of food science found that exposure to LED sources for even a few hours degrades the perceived quality of milk more so than the microbial content that naturally accumulates over time. Their study determined that milk remained at high quality for two weeks when shielded from LED exposure, and consumers overwhelmingly preferred the older, shielded milk over fresh milk stored in a typical container that had been exposed to LED lighting for as little as four hours.

This Guy Built a Technicolor Disco Ball With 540 LEDs

Need a high-tech idea for your next disco party? Look no further. Mechanical engineering grad Garrison Burger spent the past six months building a giant programmable ball that contains 540 LEDs. Burger used 180 custom-printed circuit boards, a 3D-printed frame, and fiberglass rods to connect everything. The setup is powered by four gigantic 10,000-mAh LiPo batteries, and the whole thing is controlled by an Arduino Teensy.

Venture Lighting offers energy-saving LED corn lamps for retrofits

Venture Lighting Europe has introduced new high efficiency Retrofit LED Corn Lamps to its growing range of VLED products for the industrial and commercial markets. The company has launched its own version of the well-known lamp as a high performance solution for new or retrofit installations that can save businesses a significant amount of money.

 

Available in six outputs, the new range of LED Corn Lamps are a sustainable and cost-effective direct replacement for traditional halogen, incandescent and HID light sources across a vast range of applications. With a 360° light distribution the lamps are a particularly good addition to round reflector or wide-distribution luminaires, which can cut down the number of fixtures needed across a scheme.

Based on the traditional E37 or E40 fixtures, the new Retrofit Corn Lamps can be used for a straightforward lamp replacement without the need for a system or luminaire exchange to help keep the cost and time of an installation to a minimum.
 

Panasonic Develops Connectors for Connecting In-vehicle LED Lamp Modules to Boards

Panasonic Corporation announced that it has developed connectors for connecting in-vehicle LED lamp modules to control boards. These connectors improve in designing in-vehicle LED lighting.  One of these is a "Board to FPC Connector", the first of its kind in the industry*1 that is suitable for cable connection to daytime running lights (DRLs), which are kept switched on during the daytime, and in rear lamps. The other is a "Board to Wire Connector", the lowest-profile connector in the industry*2 that is suitable for LED headlamp modules.

Intelligent LEDs improve productivity and the bottom line

Geodis is an international transportation and logistics service provider that operates an asset recovery center in Nieder-Olm, Germany. After replacing standard T5 lighting with an intelligent LED lighting and software platform, the company saw a return on investment in four and a half years. The facility processes repair and recycling of customer equipment, which requires attention to detail and good lighting. “We were searching for a reliable, intelligently controlled LED lighting technology that would offer our employees optimal visual conditions for a safe and productive environment while lowering the costs of lighting and its maintenance,” says Sven Kircher, manager of central purchasing in Northern Europe.

Furry LEDs in the making

As a first step to designing densely packed arrays of nanowire-sized LEDs, a team of researchers from Berlin-based Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) have used a titanium foil as a flexible substrate to grow impeccably detached and vertically aligned GaN nanowires. Grown through plasma–assisted molecular beam epitaxy, the nanowires they obtained exhibited a similar crystalline perfection, a lower degree of coalescence, a higher concentration of stacking faults, and a reduced density of inversion domain boundaries than those prepared on Si substrates, they reported.

Lights Out for CFLs

Compact fluorescent light bulbs were once all the rage, promoted as an energy-efficient way to light homes and businesses. But those spiral-shaped CFLs may be fading into history. Light-emitting diodes are the coming thing now as states drop incentives for CFL purchases and invest in LEDs instead. Ten years ago, state energy efficiency programs were spending millions of dollars — collected from consumers through their electricity bills — to promote the use of CFLs. More efficient than Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb, CFLs also cost more, so states provided financial incentives to bring down the price.

Integrated LEDs By ILEX

ILEX is lighting the way with a selection of integrated LEDs, revamping some of their most popular fixtures with these cutting edge capabilities. The brand’s integrated LEDs keep design at the forefront, with the sleek and modern aesthetic for which ILEX is known, while having the added benefits this category provides, such as ADA compliance, fixture longevity, and attractive light temperature. Integrated LEDs continue to make their presence known on the market due to a number of factors. They are virtually maintenance free, with a light designed to last as long as the fixture encompassing it. ILEX’s integrated LED lights feature an attractive 3000K color temperature.

Energy-Saving Lightbulb Manufacturer Plumen Secures Over £250,000

Plumen, a UK-based energy-saving lightbulb manufacture, launched a Crowdcube campaign on Wednesday to raise £500,000 as it prepares to launch new products. Founded in 2007 and launched in 2010, Plumen revealed it has created energy-saving lighting, using design and beauty to inspire adoption of sustainable lighting technology. The company reported that an estimated 130,000+ homes in over 75 countries and is featured in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Design Museum and the V&A to name.

LEDs light up 50% of households in Dakshina Kannada

The district appears to have lapped up the initiative to save energy by wholeheartedly embracing LED bulbs, which seem to be swiftly replacing the energy sapping incandescent light bulbs. As on date, about 50% of the households in Dakshina Kannada are using LEDs. The scheme was launched in Mangaluru in the first week of February, with 29,0 32 bulbs being sold that month. As on 5 June, 15.58 lakh LED bulbs have been purchased by MESCOM consumers. In terms of sale of LED bulbs, Mangaluru is third, behind Bengaluru with 48 lakh and Mysuru with 25 lakh. So far, 1.03 crore LED bulbs have replaced incandescent light bulbs in the state.

Scalable semipolar gallium nitride templates for high-speed LEDs

Visible emitting LEDs based on gallium nitride (GaN) materials have made tremendous progress since their initial development in the early 1990s. Indeed, these LEDs are now in everyday use in many applications, e.g., for solid state lighting, and for backlighting in televisions and smartphones. LED technology, however, also has several inherent problems. These include decreasing efficiency under high injection current (droop), color change with increasing current, and poor efficiency in the green and yellow parts of the spectrum. These problems are associated with the natural polar (0001) crystal plane of wurtzite GaN, on which commercial LEDs are based, with the use of ‘c-plane’ sapphire substrates.

An LED Light Bulb With a Warm, Retro Glow

Founded by four students at the University of Edinburgh, Tala creates vintage-style lightbulbs in a range of old-school shapes (some with subtly tinted mouth-blown glass). In these bulbs, a string of superthin LED chips simulates the glowing filament of incandescents. But what really sets these apart are their less-concrete qualities. Take dimming, for instance, among the most endearing features of incandescent bulbs—and one that eco-friendly CFL and LED lights have trouble with. While many LED bulbs stutter as you adjust their intensity, Tala’s ramp up and down smoothly (a must for orchestrating romantic dinners or cozying up with a good novel).

Shining spotlight on savings with LEDs

Streetlights have glowed in Vancouver since before 1900 when Main Street boasted six electric-arc lamps. From that humble beginning, thousands of streetlights now brighten streets, roadways and parking lots all across Clark County. The old electric-arc technology has faded. Now improved light-emitting diodes are eclipsing high-pressure sodium lamps, just as those once replaced even older lighting technologies. Over the past few years, pilot projects have tested LED street lighting in smaller county communities and those tests have proven successful. In 2014, two pilot projects replaced about fifty streetlights with LEDs in Battle Ground and a couple hundred in Camas and Washougal.

Soraa LEDs Illuminate Saalfred Fairy Grottoes

The LED lamps of lighting technology provider Soraa have been installed to illuminate the mineral formations of Saalfred Fairy Grottoes in Thüringen, Germany. Through Soraa LEDs and lighting artist Rolf Zavelberg’s approach to lighting design, thousands of visitors can now see the subtleties in the stalagmite colors within the underground caverns.

Atom AR2 security cam uses a light bulb socket for power

Debuting at Computex in Taiwan, the Amaryllo Atom AR2 is a 360-degree home security camera that cleverly uses a home's light socket as a power source, saving you the need to mount it on the wall. The Atom AR2 comes with auto-tracking and heat sensors (so you can't approach it from behind), and now comes with LED lights so the socket doesn't get wasted, an issue with the older Atom model.

Brighter LEDs, Thanks to Firefly Butts

Fireflies, or lightning bugs, are undoubtedly one of the many joys of summer. Assisting the bugs in this romantic calling are their luminous rear ends, which flash brilliant yellow. The lanterns consist of three layers, and the one in the middle produces light. The other two layers consist of microstructures that manipulate light in such a way as to increase transmission. A team found that these structures improved light transmission through various optical tricks, for instance by index matching and reducing internal reflection. Essentially, the firefly abdomen is a well-built organic light-emitting diode (OLED).

Bold goals at CEM7: Philips projects 2 billion LEDs sold

Energy ministers from around the world converged with business and NGO leaders and entrepreneurs in downtown San Francisco Wednesday for the first day of the Clean Energy Ministerial 7th gathering (CEM7) to figure out how to transition the world to clean energy. It was entrepreneurs and businesses that got things going. To begin delivering on CEM's “global lighting challenge” to deploy energy-efficient lighting worldwide, Philips Lighting announced it aims tol sell 2 billion LED light bulbs — an electricity savings equal to taking 60 coal-fired power plants offline — in the next five years.

Italian Eatery Installs LED Lighting

Sauce Pizza and Wine believes in cooking from scratch using artisanal flours, imported cheeses, and farm fresh vegetables. The Arizona restaurant chain brings together an artisanal Italian collection of delicious pastas, bruschetta appetizers and seasonal salads. To maintain a warm inviting dining environment and lower energy costs, the restaurant chain recently converted its lighting to LEDs for all of its locations. Scott Kilpatrick, CEO and president of Sauce Pizza and Wine, said, “We wanted to reduce our electricity consumption, lower our maintenance costs, and maintain the control of light levels at each of our locations. The switch to LEDs enables us to meet those goals and allows us to concentrate on our food and our guests.”

Quantum Dots Deep Into Hybrid LEDs

Boasting record-breaking color conversion effective quantum yields, an international team of researchers has designed a novel photonic quasi-crystal LED structure that deeply embeds quantum dots within the whole stack of the LED's active layers. The researchers first grew a LED stack of GaN/InGaN Multi-Quantum Well (MQW) onto a sapphire substrate, and then used nano-imprint lithography and plasma etching to "punch" the whole stack and structure it as a 12-fold symmetric quasi-crystal (PQC).

Multi-LEDS, lasers hold promise of brighter headlights

Your next car’s headlights could be brighter and more focused, illuminating farther down the road but continually shifting to avoid shining into the eyes of other drivers. Multi-LED headlights that use cameras to direct their beams with unprecedented accuracy are among the advanced projects supplier Varroc Lighting Systems is developing at its suburban Detroit headquarters

LED Lights for Boats — Choosing Yours

Compact, efficient, long-lasting and bright, marine LEDs enhance safety at night and allow boating anglers to add illumination just about anywhere it’s needed. You’ll find marine LEDs in navigation, spreader, search, underwater, cabin, courtesy, livewell and accent lights from a host of brands, including Aqualuma, Hella, Imtra, Lumitec, Lumishore, OceanLED, Rigid, Taco Marine and many others. The range of products can prove mind-boggling.

Knightdale, Duke work together to update streetlights with LEDs

The town and Duke Energy are beginning the second phase of a plan to put LED bulbs in all of the utility’s streetlights. LED, or light-emitting diode, lights use less energy than the fluorescent lights they will be replacing, and provide a more pleasing light, town spokesman Brian Bowman said. “It’s really a two-prong benefit here,” Bowman said. “First it’s going to save us money. The thing I’m excited about is they look better. So what you’ve got is a superior product that costs less to operate.”

Nashua converting all streetlights to LEDs

City officials this week approved a nearly $1.5 million project to convert all streetlights in Nashua to Light Emitting Diode lights.Mayor Jim Donchess told the Board of Aldermen that the project will replace every high pressure sodium streetlight to an LED light, and it will save the city substantial electrical costs. Currently, the city spends about $800,000 a year on its bill for streetlights. The new LED lighting will enable an annual savings of more than $300,000, said Donchess.

Quantum Dots Deep Into Hybrid LEDs

Boasting record-breaking color conversion effective quantum yields, an international team of researchers has designed a novel photonic quasi-crystal LED structure that deeply embeds quantum dots within the whole stack of the LED's active layers. The researchers first grew a LED stack of GaN/InGaN Multi-Quantum Well (MQW) onto a sapphire substrate, and then used nano-imprint lithography and plasma etching to "punch" the whole stack and structure it as a 12-fold symmetric quasi-crystal (PQC).