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LEDtronics Introduces Recessed Ceiling Luminaire
SSLighting Design News Staff
February 9, 2010... The company says its LED luminaires offer up to 300% longer lifespan compared to fluorescent lamps and use up to 50% less energy than standard fluorescent 2'x 2' panels. The CLL2X2-400-TPW-001W offers a bright beam of 1,840 lumens, with an efficient power factor of 1.0. The CLL2X2-800-TPW-001W offers an impressive 2,753 lumens and a power factor of 0.99. Both have a color rendering index of 75. Company News Release,
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LEDtronics, Inc. has introduced LED replacements for recessed T-bar fluorescent ceiling luminaires: CLL2X2-400-TPW-001W. It uses only 24W power and replaces 2ftx2ft standard fluorescent 64W units, while CLL2X2-800-TPW-001W consumes less than 36W and replaces 80W fluorescent fixtures. They operate on a voltage range of 100-277VAC with a correlated color temperature of 5000K.
Cree Breaks 200 Lumen Per Watt Barrier
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 4, 2010...Cree, an innovator in LED lighting, claims to have broken the 200 lumen per Watt barrier. The company of Durham, North Carolina announced that its white, power LED achieved a record of 208 lumens per Watt at a drive current of 350mA under standard LED test conditions. The LED had a correlated color temperature of 4579 K.
Cree noted in a news release that this R&D result passes a significant milestone within the solid-state lighting industry. Cree says that while this level of performance is not yet available in Cree’s production LEDs, it continues to lead the industry with the broadest family of high-performance LEDs.
“We have now broken the elusive 200-lumen-per-watt efficacy barrier for a single white power LED,” said John Edmond, Cree co-founder and director of advanced optoelectronics. “This is a result of improvements in blue optical output power, lower operating voltage and higher conversion efficiency. We continue to push the envelope in white LED technology to enable the highest efficiency white lighting products in the marketplace.”
Cree News Release
Acclaim Lighting Part of Upgrade and Revamp of the Hard Rock Casino in Tulsa, Oklahoma
SSLighting Design News Staff
February 4, 2010...The Cherokee Indian-operated casino teamed up with one of the premier names in rock-n-roll themed entertainment to form the Hard Rock Casino in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A $155 million upgrade and expansion of the former Cherokee Casino Resort was required to transform the gaming/hotel/nightclub complex into a Hard Rock franchise.
The casino, still owned and operated by Cherokee Nation despite its new name, was looking to get a facelift, when the branding and renovation opportunity with Hard Rock arose. Along with the obvious advantages of aligning itself with the world-famous pop culture icon came the challenge of assimilating $2 million worth of rock music memorabilia and other Hard Rock design parameters into the casino’s Native American roots.
The design required a blending of the old and new. This blending played out most dramatically on a large plastic light sculpture that hangs over 7 banks of slot machines in the casino’s 125,000 sq. ft. gaming area. The massive sculpture designed in a Native American motif with 7 elongated feather-like points, was comprised of a black metal frame containing pieces of different colored plastic. These were lit by fluorescent tubes from inside. However, the sculpture was much too bright and prominent for Hard Rock’s decor requirements, said Hard Rock designer Warwick Stone “the (Cherokee) chief liked it,” so the sculpture had to stay.
Thanks to some help from David Brecheen of Production Essentials LLC (Edmond, Oklahoma) and Acclaim Lighting LEDs, Stone was able to transform the light sculpture into a more subtle color-changing piece that blended in with Hard Rock’s design elements, while preserving the fixture’s Cherokee-inspired heritage.
Acclaim News Release
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Orange County Convention Center’s Green Initiatives Include Albeo LED Lighting
SSLighting Design News Staff
February 4, 2010...As part of the Orange County Convention Center's range of green initiatives, Albeo Technologies Inc. is supplying its C-Series low bay LED lights to the convention center for a number of retrofit projects.
The Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) offers a seven-million-square-foot facility, with 2.1 million square feet of exhibition space, making it the second largest convention center in the U.S. Each year, the OCCC brings more than 250 events to the Central Florida area. As a result, roughly 1.4 million attendees contribute approximately $1.9 billion to the area’s economic impact annually.
The first project utilized Albeo’s 75W C-Series Low Bay to replace aging 400W Metal Halide fixtures. They provide a savings of 325 Watts per fixture. Albeo says that the combined energy and maintenance savings achieved with its solution resulted in a payback of less than one year. The installation is estimated to eliminate over 1,400,000 lbs of carbon over its lifetime.
“Albeo is proud to be part of Orange County Convention Center’s Green initiatives and sustainability projects. In commercial spaces like OCCC lighting is often one of the major electrical loads and with paybacks of less than one year, why install anything other than LED lighting?” said Paul Winker, Director of Business Development at Albeo. “Orange County’s commitment to deploy green technologies and educate the public through its Climate-Change Education Center is exemplary.”
Albeo Technologies News Release
Future Lighting Solutions Launches Line of LED Light Engines
SSLighting Design News Staff
February 4, 2010...Future Lighting Solutions a maker of LED light engines using Luxeon Rebel LEDs, has created an exclusive line of light engines designed to accelerate the development, prototyping and delivery of solid state lighting applications as well as reduce fixture development costs. The new simpleLED program light engines are reportedly available in 12 form factors and 600-plus customization options, all featuring ANSI-binned Luxeon Rebel LEDs integrated with key components.
The light engines come in twelve off-the-shelf configurations that are available for immediate shipment. These include: linear, circular and square layouts with 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 9 white 3000K, 3500K or 4000K LEDs. Each assembly incorporates circuit boards, LEDs, Tyco Electronics connectors, and 10mm, 20mm, Tri-Lens or ultra-wide Carclo optics. Applications for the light engines range from recessed downlights to low bay, cove, wall wash, display case, under cabinet, desk/task and street/area lighting.
Custom configurations can be easily specified online with Future's new Light Engine Builder and shipped in four weeks. Additional customization including color LEDs and alternative optics is available with slightly longer lead times.
The company says that all the light engines in the program offer a three-year manufacturer's warranty as well as the full benefits of the Luxeon Rebel platform, including the ability to support drive currents up to 1000mA, compliance with ANSI color binning requirements, and a minimum CRI of 80. The LEDs are also UL Recognized, eliminating the need for a full in-system LED component investigation to obtain UL Listed status for new luminaires built with Future's light engines.
"LED light engines save time and development costs for smaller manufacturers, those with limited LED development experience, companies with rapid prototyping needs, and others by reducing engineering, sourcing and assembly needs. But until now, the selection in the market has been very small," said Danny Miller, Vice President - Lighting Integration for Future Lighting Solutions. "The breadth of product and extensive customization available through our simpleLED program mark a quantum leap in simplifying solid state lighting development."
Future Lighting Solutions News Release
Cree Offers New 24-Die XLamp MPL Easy White LED
LIGHTimes News Staff
February 2, 2010...Cree has introduced an LED package that delivers up to 1500 lumens at 75 lumens per Watt.
Cree claims that its new lighting-class LED can make energy inefficient light bulbs obsolete.
The XLamp MPL EasyWhite takes advantage of the company's previously announced EasyWhite binning which essentially mixes a variety of chips in a 7 MacAdam range in a single bin in order to average the color to a narrower 4 MacAdam range. The MLP EasyWhite encapsulates 24 die together. The XLamp MPL EasyWhite LED features up to 1500 lumens at 250 mA and has a compact 12-mm x 13-mm footprint, which the company says is 72 percent smaller than the nearest-competing LED component.
The multi-chip XLamp MPL EasyWhite LED is reportedly optimized for directional lighting applications, including PAR- or BR-style light bulbs. Cree boasts that with the proper system design, the MPL EasyWhite LED can deliver the required light output for a 3000-K, 75-Watt equivalent BR-30 light bulb, but would consume 78-percent less energy than traditional incandescent technology.
Cree News Release,
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Seoul Semiconductor to Introduce 100 lm/W LED Source During First Quarter 2010
SSLighting Design News Staff
February 2, 2010...Seoul Semiconductor, a global LED manufacturer, announced that it will introduce a 100 lm/W AC LED light source during the first quarter of 2010. Offering 25% greater efficiency than existing LED light products, this latest offering from Seoul Semiconductor’s Acriche brand will be available for sampling by March 1. It will be supported with a global marketing campaign.
The company says that Acriche outlasts incandescent and compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs, and due to its high reliability and long life is less costly to use than traditional lighting methods.
Like the company's other Acriche products, the new 100 lm/W LED needs no AC-DC converter. Additionally, it reportedly generates less than 1/10th the carbon emissions of an incandescent bulb. Seoul Semiconductor News Release,
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Commentary & Perspectives...
The Challenge of the 'Tween' LED Lights
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
February 2, 2010...Kermit the Frog's famous one-liner was, "It isn't easy being green..." inspires us to suggest that, "It isn't easy being tween" here in the solid state lighting world. By 'tween' we mean sitting in the nether-world of purpose-built lighting that is conveniently enabled by LED lighting. A big opportunity for the LED lighting world is to put light, or particular kinds of light, in places and form factors where it didn't work (easily or cost-effectively) before. Examples could include the world of color changing, as well as "flat" lights, glowing panels, multi-directional and semi-omnidirectional bulbs and luminaires.
Color changing, and even fixed color RGB sources, are very understandable in what they do and why they work well. If you can generate a 'native' light color, instead of filtering a wider spectrum source, you'd expect to get a lot more efficient solution. Present a source with a full or nearly full spectrum (think halogen or metal-halide) and then throw a blue colored lens in front of it, and I've been told that you're effectively disposing of 90% of the lumens that you started with. Feed a current to a blue LED, and you get 100% blue photons from start to finish, and at efficiencies that are as good or better than the full spectrum source was for generating all its light. It's a no-brainer to understand why Hollywood, theater and entertainment lighting leaped onto LED-based sources from early on. We all know red-green-blue generates what our eyes perceive as "white" since true white is simply a real healthy mix of the full spectrum. The funny thing is that an RGB solution is still a little "peaky", and while our eyes appreciate the rich color it returns, the instruments do not. That shows up as a penalty when you compare RGB-generated white-lumens to incandescent, or in the case of fluorescents, phosphor-generated lumens. This isn't about the "CRI" thing (an important ongoing discussion on its own), but about the "white energy" in my layman's terms.
A good example of this comes to mind in the projector applications. About a year and half ago, we reported on our subjective experience with a Samsung pocket-projector powered by one of Luminus Devices PhlatLight LEDs. In case you're not familiar with it, the Luminus chips are around half a business card sized monsters that contain big red, green and blue LED die that are about a quarter of an inch square. They scale up and down from there, and also have phosphor converted white solutions as well, but the RGB family made it's mark in the DLP television wave as the source that provided much richer colors, and a 50,000 to 100,000 hour life, instead of the optimistic 5000 that your standard metal-halide through a color wheel solution did. What my eyes saw from this 200-ish lumen RGB LED projector was overall brightness perception that came a good way towards matching our 2000 lumen conference projector. When it came to color quality, there was no contest at all. The movie on the LED projector didn't have that washed out color look, and it just 'felt' better. Mark McClear of Cree, in a talk at last summer's DOE meet in Chicago, posed the question, "Why can't the standards acknowledge what we see with our eyes?" Namely that LED light can provide a higher quality that currently isn't reflected in the numbers.
There are other interesting "tweens" that we're having to come to grips with now. Most recently, we've seen several new Edison-based A-lamp designs hit the market. When we think A-lamp, we picture our very familiar 60, 75 or 100w incandescents, with the visible addition of the heat sink there between the base and 'globe' in the designs of most LED challengers. With the virtual completion of the DOE-generated "Integral LED Lamp" Energy Star specification, there is finally a reference point on what a "replacement" for a number of standard incandescent Edison-based bulbs should do. The spec is pretty comprehensive, and places the emphasis in the right places. For PAR/R replacements, generally recognized as the easiest 'replacement bulb' challenge for LEDs to tackle, the standards are about smoothness in the distribution, the width of the beam angle, and the brightness (center beam candle power) on the target. The MR specs follow the same approach, and since you can measure those characteristics for the 'average' incandescent solution, the bar was set to meet the distribution and output, and do it at X number of lumens per watt or better. PAR/R/MR lamps need to beat 40-45 lm/watt (the lower number for the smaller lamps), decorative/candelabra base need to beat 40 lm/watt, and A-lamps need to beat 50 lm/watt for less 10w of LED power, or 55 lm/watt for those greater than 10w. (You can see PDF slide copies of the presentation that Marc Ledbetter of the DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory gave at the January 2010 LA SSL Summit here).
Then there's the tweens. They have the same efficacy requirements as the A-lamps, but drop the requirement for a particular distribution which allows things like A-lamp shaped directional lamps, as a very specific 'for instance'. Why would you want one of those? For one big reason, to replace standard incandescent A-lamps, and CFLs in the zillions of pendants and cans that they have found themselves in. Would R's work as well? Seems like they would, but for whatever reason, whether for looks or cost, or because the fixture had an attractive way to leak some of the light out in other directions, omnidirectional lamps are in there, and mostly being asked to send light in one direction. What an ideal fit for LEDs, since they really do like to send light out directionally, and those sockets are being served by 10-40lm/watt omnidirectional solutions right now (I'm guessing the light loss is likely on the order of 25-50%, so consider the range to be 5-30lm/watt out of the fixture). Here's the part that's not easy when being tween... describing it.
Humans seem to have gotten really used to the whole "Watt" thing, and the Energy Star specs acknowledge that by setting guidelines for what you can claim as an equivalent to incandescents of different wattages. And they have clearly set them with the intention that a consumer is not disappointed by the amount of brightness that they observe from the equivalent. Challenge number one comes in the form of potentially more perceived brightness coming from the higher quality LED solutions. There's already anecdotal evidence of people needing to "step down" in what they thought would be an equivalent in order to get the same overall impression of light and color. Challenge number two comes when you're a tween, such as the A-lamp form factor that is tailored to downlights. Or similarly, the one that will result from "a bulb really optimized for use in a table lamp" as Marc Ledbetter put it. (That would be one which cast the majority of its light downward towards the floor or book reader, with correct doses of side lighting to illuminate the shade and up lighting to give a nice ambiance to the room... in other words, "smart design"). But how do you describe the equivalence. If you say, "equivalent to a 75w incandescent in downlight applications" you an expect a knock at the door from the Energy Star police (not yet elevated to czar status) because you don't have a PAR/R or A-omnidirectional type of distribution. "Don't make the comparisons if you're 'other'," says the spec. Oh my. Do you not worry about being Energy Star, or not make the comparison? Tough choice. As an industry, let's keep giving it deep thought for ways to both draw the comparisons, as well as educate the coming masses that it's not about the watts anymore. Lumens and efficacy... lumens and efficacy... lumens and efficacy. Once we get that, hopefully we'll be ready to re-flash their programming to cover the whole "perceived brightness" thing. (Sigh).
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