LED + SSL

I wrote this article for the March issue of tED Magazine. Reprinted with permission. The year 2014 represented a major milestone in adoption of LED technology in terms of demand and product design. With energy savings as high as 30-40 percent (not including additional control impacts), long rated life (with the promise of little or [...]

I wrote this article for the April 2015 issue of tED Magazine. Reprinted with permission. From walls to paper to plastics to clothing, white abounds in the built environment. Lighting research, however, has focused on the rendering of colors. The color rendering index (CRI), in fact, is based on the rendering of colors by a [...]

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Presidential Challenge for Advanced Outdoor Lighting recently amped up its goal of transforming America’s streetlights to higher efficiency. As part of the DOE’s Better Buildings Initiative program, the Presidential Challenge aims to work with municipalities to upgrade 1.5 million U.S. streetlights to LED over the next two years. Click [...]

. An article advocating for high color rendering in consumer lighting products and the policies that support their adoption is now available. The paper is a collaboration between the California Lighting Technology Center, the University of British Columbia and the National Research Council of Canada. The article focuses on the tradeoff between color rendering accuracy [...]

2015 has brought a significant drop in rebates for LED replacement lamps such as PARs, MRs, A-lamps and decorative lamps, according to Briteswitch. While the average rebate for replacement LED lamps was $11.12 in 2014, this year it dropped to $7.51, a 32% decline. This change comes as rebate programs try to adjust their offerings [...]

2014 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Professor Amano Hiroshi, recently stated LED lamps will be a mainstream consumer light source by 2016, but challenges remain. Primarily, he points out, costs must come down further, starting with production costs, which should come down five times by 2020. For this to occur, demand must increase globally and [...]

The U.S. Department of Energy’s CALiPER program has released Report 20.3, which is part of a series of investigations on LED PAR38 lamps. Report 20.3 focuses on an evaluation of robustness. Three samples each of 40 of the Series 20 PAR38 lamps (including LED and benchmark conventional lamps) underwent multistress testing, whereby samples were subjected [...]

Republication of Postings from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solid-State Lighting Program by Jim Brodrick, SSL Program Manager, U.S. Department of Energy High-flux lighting applications in high-temperature environments present a formidable challenge for LEDs. The higher the luminous flux from a luminaire, the more difficult it can be to properly dissipate the heat, to [...]

This interesting presentation by Acuity Brands portrays OLED lighting as rapidly advancing in performance and poised for larger adoption. Check it out here.