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Illumitex and the Long Center Light Up Architects of the Air Exhibit in Downtown Austin
SSLDesign News Staff
January 19, 2012...
The Architects of the Air exhibition has been internationally successful. While it originally grew out of a theater project for people with learning disabilities, accessibility to the widest audience has remained one of the central goals of the exhibit. All ages, all cultures, including the young and the elderly can appreciate the temporary artwork. On the night that the maze was inflated, Illumitex LED fixtures illuminated the Mirazozo structure from within using approximately 80 Illumitex LED fixtures that consumed less than 6000 watts, compared to the the 19kW that would more typically be required.
Architects of Air have previously illuminated the structure from the inside, for nighttime decoration, with a mix of 400W metal halides and halogen PAR lamps. Darren McCosky, Illumitex' Director of Engineering, commented, "Based upon their past experience, one key concern they had would be the potential for damage in case of a power loss and deflation of the structure. With metal halides and halogens, they required substantial protection to avoid the PVC fabric from ever coming in contact with the hot lamps. Once they realized that the Illumitex light bars were running at only about 40-degrees C, it simply wasn't an issue."
The illumination was implemented with a series of single and dual light-bars, prototypes of Illumitex' Eclipse line, which is loosely based upon their existing line of horticultural luminaires.
“Using our innovative LED technology to literally ‘shine a light’ on the performing arts in Austin is one of those rare collaborations that brings together the best of art and technology,” said Jeremy Ludyjan, Global Marketing Director of Illumitex. “Being a part of the unique Architects of Air installation demonstrates Illumitex’ commitment to bringing energy efficient LED lighting to beautiful and inspiring environments.”
Austin, Texas-based, Illumitex and the Long Center illuminated the opening night of the Architects of Air Mirazozo Luminarium, an enormous sculpture in the form of an architecturally artistic maze. The Luminarium (as it was called) took place on the West lawn of the Long Center in Downtown Austin. A maze of winding paths and soaring domes was not actually constructed on site, but was inflated and anchored in a mere 20 minutes. The maze temporarily occupies nearly 11,000 square feet of space.
Lumenpulse Enters Partnership with Lightitude for Middle East and North Africa LED Fixture Market
SSLDesign News Staff
January 19, 2012...Lumenpulse Inc. based in Montreal, Canada, announced the signing of a strategic partnership agreement with UAE-based Lightitude. The agreement will include Lightitude support for Lumenpulse’s business in the Middle East and North Africa. The relationship will be managed out of Lumenpulse’s recently opened London, UK office.
Under the terms of the agreement, Lightitude will act as a specification agent. As specifying agent, Lightitude will provide local support to specifiers, including managing sample requests, facilitating mock ups, and offering technical and commercial support as needed. In this way, Lightitude hopes to ensure that Lumenpulse can locally and actively support project specification in the region. Lumenpulse says that the agreement will also ensure that distributors and agents in the region will continue to receive the most competitive Lumenpulse pricing available.
“The region has a unique trading culture that supports multiple distribution networks in each country,” said Gorm Teichert, Executive Vice President International Sales for Lumenpulse. “Lightitude will work in a very strategic role on our behalf and be the feet on the ground for Lumenpulse. They bring knowledge and experience of local markets and networks – and together with our LED fixture expertise-- will enable us to choose the right distribution channels and be closer to the specifier so we can add value to our clients.”
“We created Lightitude to be an impartial specification partner for the new age of lighting companies.” said Ziad Debbas, Vice President Lighting at Lightitude parent company Debbas Group. “We are delighted to enter into this agreement with a truly innovative company like Lumenpulse. This is a forward thinking relationship that will ensure local markets will be fully supported as they realize the potential of Lumenpulse’s high quality portfolio of products.”
New LED Scheme Illuminates Ice House Square
SSLDesign News Staff
January 19, 2012...
An imaginative, multi-colored interactive lighting scheme using LED lighting strips was put in place around paving stones at Ice House Square in SAI Swansea Waterfront. The LED strips were placed in a grid pattern to give the Prince of Wales Dock a lighting scheme and a similar style to the rest of the city center and to better link the two. Ice House Square serves as an important point of arrival for pedestrians and cyclists and is the first area of public space in SA1 that visitors see from across the Sail Bridge.
The Swansea Council in partnership with the Welsh Government commissioned international artist Peter Fink to showcase and celebrate the square as a point of arrival with a dynamic and interactive lighting scheme as part of a public art strategy. Mr. Fink won the commission after a national open call for submissions that attracted applications from overseas.
He worked with Urban Projects Limited to put the lighting scheme in place. His design intersects the formal grid of the paving with lines of light flowing diagonally across the square in and around the trees in the area. Mr. Fink set up the lights to run on a program that controls their color and speed. However, passers-by can activate sensors under the paving stones which change the light sequence. SA1 developers funded the project with money they granted for artwork in the area.
Alan Robinson, Swansea Council’s Cabinet Member for Community Regeneration, said, “As the main pedestrian point of entry into SA1 from the city centre, it’s important that the Ice House Square is an impressive gateway that attracts people across the Sail Bridge. This interactive lighting scheme will transform the square by attracting more footfall and boosting businesses in the area. "
Robinson added,
“Schemes of this nature are intended to develop SA1’s standing as an innovative and dynamic waterfront destination that’s attractive for residents, visitors and potential investors.”
The Prince of Wales Dock was opened in 1881 as the last of the great Victorian docks to be built in Swansea. Together with the North and South Docks, the Prince of Wales Dock transformed Swansea into one of the great ports of the Victorian world.
Active-Semi Announces New LED Driver Technology Which Company Claims Reduces Component Count and Lasts Longer
LIGHTimes News Staff
January 19, 2012...Active-Semi of San Jose, California USA unveiled a new type of LED driver which the company claims reduces the component count of conventional driver technology. The company unveiled the technology at the 4th Lighting Japan LED/OLED Technology Expo in Tokyo on January 18-20.
A conventional LED driver converts AC current to DC current so an LED luminaire can run relatively smoothly. LED drivers use electrolytic capacitors to store the charge temporarily. This type of capacitors basically uses up the electrolytic fluid within the capacitor, and it fails.
Active-Semi boasts that its new ACT801/802 LED driver IC does the same functions as a conventional LED driver, but uses the company's Active Direct Drive and Active Valley Fill technologies to do this without needing an electrolytic driver (which eventually fails because of being used up). It also does this without the need for magnetic components that help control for electo-magnetic interference.
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Commentary & Perspectives...
Squeezing Out More Lumens for Less
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
January 19, 2012...I read a comment recently that suggested we, the industry, would need some big (significant, fundamental) breakthroughs in order to achieve the levels of efficiency that were needed to realize the ultimate success of LED lighting. While "breakthroughs" are always handy in the technology world, they usually don't need the modifier "big" in front of them to create a success. In an oft-repeated persistence meme, "A big shot is just someone who took little shots, but just kept shooting." So it goes with LEDs and LED lighting. Success won't be evading us even if the material science topped out right where it is right now (which it won't), or even if other conspiracies forced an end to the core efficiency improvements. While GM and "big oil" are said to have quashed the 200 mile-per-gallon carburetor, it appears the analogous suspects in light bulbs (GE, Philips, et al), have failed miserably to stop LED technology in time to stave off the eventual demise of incandescent and fluorescent lamps (... although they are probably sitting on alien lighting technology that delivers millions of lumens per nano-watt, but that's a different story). That LEDs will succeed is good news, though, as it means we'll have time to circle back around to the R&D that will power our cars on di-hydrogen oxide (also known as H20).
In defense of the proposition that we're going to get there regardless, its worth a quick word on the nature of lumens, since "lumens per watt" is typical recognized as "the goal" for lighting technology improvements. Not to get too "sciency" here (especially since I can't bluff that well), it's important to understand that all lumens are not created equally, in the sense that differing "optical power" is needed to create differing color lumens. "Optical power" which is the measure of the energy represented in the photons that something, an LED in this case, emits. Lumens are about the "perceived" brightness as interpreted by the human eye which, photopically speaking, peaks at about 555 nm, which is that green-yellow transition area. Not surprisingly, our eyes balance out the different frequencies of light to help us see the world the way we're "supposed to" (a self-defining kind of thing). The natural starting point for all this is the sun, since that's been main light source for humans, and the rest of the earth, for more than a couple of years now. The big "for instance" is our sensitivity to that yellow-green light. The sun generates a nicely shaped spectral "energy" curve that starts out at about 1 W/sq.meter/nm in the deep blue, peaks about 40% above that in the blue-to-green range, and then tapers back down to most of the way back to around 1.25 W/sq.meter/nm after the red (with some variance in those numbers based upon altitude and atmospheric conditions). There is a noticeable down-blip in along the green-yellow border, conveniently there in the area that challenges us, maybe helping us to see things we need to find, such as food, which is often found in the midst of green leaves (fruit) or is green itself (veggies). Maybe that explains why lots of people prefer green vegetables but don't like beets... not in the peak color sensitivity.
Why that all matters, is to make sure we rule out any "gaming the lumens" approach to efficiency gains. One simplistic cheat to more lumens per watt would be to pump up the green, and the other colors in the "center" of the spectrum that we're more sensitive too, while dialing back the colors we're less sensitive too. Anytime you've seen a LED that had a greenish tinge to it, you've experienced that skew, whether it was intentional or not. Interesting to note is that native green LEDs are the least efficient kinds, so it's fortunate that we don't need much green in order to have accurate color perception... seems an interesting coincidence. I suspect a few manufacturers in the earlier days may have had runs with a new phosphor approach that turned out a bit green, and while not planning to carry that over to the volume product, it could have come in handy for quoting the leap forward in total lumens the "white" LED was producing. CRI and eventually CQI, the more accurate and technology independent Color Quality Index, will help keep this in check as new players of significance appear on the LED manufacturing scene. And that can be expected, as China's newest 5-year plan has called for those many small LED manufacturers who enjoyed MOCVD equipment subsidies, to please now merge themselves into just a few new LED manufacturing powerhouses. It should be noted that blue-tinged white LEDs similarly offer more lumens-per-watt, but for different reasons. In that instance, it's simply that less of the original blue photons are converted by the phosphor, and come right on through unmolested, able to register lots of lumens in our blue-sensitive eyes. Conveniently we can apply the existing lighting term of "cool" to the resulting color family, so it's not a fault, just a feature.
With laboratory results of white LEDs having been announced at over 200 lumens per watt, and production devices now at 150, it would present a compelling case that we'll get above 200 for production LEDs in the near future. If we assume that's as far as the efficiency game will take us, is it good enough? I think so, for two simple reasons: 1) These are semiconductor devices, and if there is one thing the last 30 or so years have taught us, semiconductor manufacturing know-how continues to march forward and one inevitable result is decreasing costs. Whether from economies of scale, process tweaks or progressive innovations, such as Bridgelux' and Osram's confident announcements of GaN-on-silicon, the cost per lumen will continue to fall; and 2) We can now fit enough lumens in a square inch to replace every incumbent lighting technology in every application that exists today.
Size does matter, and I can remember clearly when cool-white LEDs crossed the lumens-per-square-inch threshold that enabled the launch of LED-based streetlights in a standard cobra-head envelope. The thing on the end of existing poles needed to be no bigger than what was there already, for a host of reasons, and solid state lighting had finally pulled it off. Much the same as when LEDs proved themselves in traffic signals, the transition became inevitable, an in just a few years, we'll be smirking when we see an "antique" non-LED cobra-head lighting up a roadway.
LED manufacturers have stayed dead on the line to the target in continuing to shrink LED footprints to enable that "holy grail" of lighting, the replacement lamp market. Lumileds fired that first round some years ago with the Luxeon Rebel family, which is currently packaging up to 200-ish warm lumens into a 3mm x 4.5mm package (which could be referred to as a "3045") when driven at 1000mA yielding around 80 lumens per watt. The tighter spacing provided enough lumens per square inch to better tap some of the more challenging lamps, such as the MR-16 format. Most recently, Cree announced its XB-D which shrink things still further into a 2525 package, allowing around 12 200+ lumen devices to be squeezed into the space that would normally fit 7-8. (Both numbers are referencing high drive currents at around 3500K... they can be driven at 350mA, with efficacies approaching 130 lm/w). While more lumens per chip is generally the thing we think of in terms of packaging efficiency, being able to fit more individual chips in a given piece of real estate also has advantages in terms of scalability, and the option to driving them "more gently" for better efficiency and/or longer lifetimes. Neither is "the best" in a blanket sense, as there are always design tradeoffs and application considerations where big chips make sense, but the upshot is that we can fit the needed number of lumens pretty much wherever we need to, and cost optimization has come right along with that.
While LEDs "taking over the world" is exciting in itself, we're always looking for the next thrilling development, and there plenty of reasons to expect that 200 lm/w isn't the end of the road. Nor is a 2525 device as compact as we expect a lighting-capable LEDs to get. The incumbent technologies are no-doubt doomed and those that do doubt will find themselves left behind when "suddenly" LEDs are the only answer, and they're still wondering if they'll really last 50,000 hours (despite passing a traffic signal on their daily commute and not realizing it contains the same set of LEDs that were installed in it 100,000 hours ago). No, we'll see more efficiency, and lower costs, with the result being innovative new ways to package and deliver light, as well as whole set of new ways to use light that we hadn't really ever dreamed of before.
Join the movers and shakers that are helping to define and shape the future of smarter, better lighting at the next installment of the SSL Summit, coming up April 3-4 in Long Beach, California.
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