Research

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Alp Durmus, Assistant Professor in the Department of Architectural Engineering at Pennsylvania State University (PSU). Many in the lighting industry know this department as a top academic lighting program in the US, but fewer know about its lighting lab. My tour of the lab’s capabilities was very [...]

  An area of growing research and practice is using lighting to help control agricultural pests. This can include horticultural lighting in indoor growing facilities (aka controlled environment agriculture or CEA) or nighttime treatment with specific wavelengths on outdoor crops. Greenhouse growers have long known that introducing supplemental grow lights to greenhouses can dramatically change [...]

New research from the University of Zaragoza in Spain quantifies how the aging eye restricts the amount of circadian light reaching the retina based on photopic illuminance reaching the corneal plane and considering the optical density of an aging crystalline lens. As the researchers state: “As a result of the described behavior, retinal illuminance may [...]

Toshiba Corporation has unveiled a new photoluminescence technology, a novel phosphor that delivers excellent solubility in polymers or organic solvents, where it is transparent and colorless under visible light, and that emits persistent red-light emissions under UV light, with excellent color purity and six times the luminescence of current phosphors. These characteristics open up many [...]

The General Services Administration (GSA) Workplace Innovation Lab is a government initiative aimed at fostering innovation and modernizing government services by testing and implementing new and emerging technologies. The lab provides a platform for federal agencies to collaborate and work with the private sector to identify and solve complex challenges facing the government and to [...]

The propeller is quietly being reinvented, in both marine and aviation. The new invention is toroidal propellers that move more efficiently and quietly through both air and water. A company named Sharrow Marine is poised to start selling toroidal propellers to replace traditional twisted-aerofoil bladed props that have been used for thousands of years, going back [...]

The December issue of designing lighting (dl) magazine has an interesting story about recent research into running infrared (IR) LEDs in reverse polarity to create active cooling. One caveat for this approach to work is that the object to be cooled has to be incredibly close to the IR LED — less than 1 wavelength’s [...]

Tony Esposito and Kevin Houser published a new study in Scientific Reports demonstrating that CCT is not suitable for predicting the biological potency of light. The experiments utilized a 5-channel LED lighting system to show that significant variation in CS and EML/mEDI exists at any fixed value of CCT and photopic illuminance. For many years, [...]

The field of photocatalysis chemistry is producing important breakthroughs in industrial chemistry. In July, LightNOW reported on a new photocatalyst revolutionizing the conversion of methane into liquid methanol, here. Now Rice University researchers have created a small, LED-powered device that converts ammonia to hydrogen on the fly Ammonia might carry hydrogen exceptionally well, but if [...]