Considering lighting is responsible for almost a quarter of the world’s energy usage, (the US alone uses around 200 TW of electricity for lighting annually), further rise in the efficiency and efficacy of light bulbs is very impressive to me. Phillips has just announced a prototype that will bring the efficiencies of LED’s to a new high while producing the most useful and certainly the most common kind of light, the warm light given off by traditional bulbs.
The TLED concept (via Philips)
The new TLED light represents many innovations in the lighting game. Arguably the biggest achievement is the emission of warm white light from an LED at 200lm/W. Although a 200lm/W makes these TLEDs twice as efficient as LED lights readily available on the market, similar efficiencies have been claimed before but usually required less than ideal operating conditions or simply did not give of comfortable light.
Preliminary reports say the light produced is of about 2700K-3000K in light temperature, gives off 1,500 lumens at 7.5Watts, has an R9 level of 20 (saturated red), and Color Rendering Index of 80. All of this means that Philips’ TLED bulbs will most likely get rid of the fluorescent bulbs commonly used in office buildings and industrial settings and make up more than half of all the worlds lighting.
The way in which Philips creates this pleasing light so efficiently, is by altering the common RGB method of mixing red, green and blue LEDs to make white light. The green LED itself is usually about 100lm/W but the blue LED has an efficiency of 380lm/W. So the folks at Philips got very clever and decided to make green light using a blue LED made of Indium-Gallium-Nitride (InGaN) and covered with a phosphor that absorbs just the right spectrum of blue to produce the green light required to make warm white light. The team also decided to use a 630nm red LED to produce the enhanced levels of saturated red.
These LED’s by Philips also produce little to no notable heat so they do not need a heat sink. This eliminates constraints on design and materials, which increases their value as it lessens costs.
Phillips said the TLEDs will be available for industrial and business settings in 2015 before they are sold for domestic use. No pricing has been announced but they most likely will be more expensive at first. Their invasion and defeat of fluorescent bulbs could be a long one considering their current wide spread use and decent efficiency. If TLEDs replaced fluorescents in the US today, we would save 100 TW, (that is 50 medium sized power plants that could be used for other things), $12 billion (not actually that much money compared to military) and 60 metric tons of CO2.
Let’s hope the TLED cost will be a catalyst to the savings…(not like their last innovation)
C
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