Showing posts with label Loucas Panagiotidis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Loucas Panagiotidis. Show all posts

Thursday, 15 January 2015

LED Technology : Light Emitting Diode

A Light Emitting Diode (LED) is a two-lead semiconductor light source. It is a basic pn-junction diode, which emits light when activated. When a suitable voltage is applied to the leads, electrons are able to recombine with electron holes within the device, releasing energy in the form of photons. This effect is called electroluminescence, and the color of the light (corresponding to the energy of the photon) is determined by the energy band gap of the semiconductor. An LED is often small in area (less than 1 mm2) and integrated optical components may be used to shape its radiation pattern.

Appearing as practical electronic components in 1962,[8] the earliest LEDs emitted low-intensity infrared light. Infrared LEDs are still frequently used as transmitting elements in remote-control circuits, such as those in remote controls for a wide variety of consumer electronics. The first visible-light LEDs were also of low intensity, and limited to red. Modern LEDs are available across the visible, ultraviolet, and infrared wavelengths, with very high brightness.

Early LEDs were often used as indicator lamps for electronic devices, replacing small incandescent bulbs. They were soon packaged into numeric readouts in the form of seven-segment displays, and were commonly seen in digital clocks. Recent developments in LEDs permit them to be used in environmental and task lighting. LEDs have many advantages over incandescent light sources including lower energy consumption, longer lifetime, improved physical robustness, smaller size, and faster switching. Light-emitting diodes are now used in applications as diverse as aviation lighting, automotive headlamps, advertising, general lighting, traffic signals, and camera flashes. However, LEDs powerful enough for room lighting are still relatively expensive, and require more precise current and heat management than compact fluorescent lamp sources of comparable output.

LEDs have allowed new text, video displays, and sensors to be developed, while their high switching rates are also useful in advanced communications technology. On October 7, 2014, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for "the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources" or, less formally, LED lamps.
Text Source: WikiPedia

Eco Lamp Recycling

Lighting manufacturers, through their trade association, National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) developed lamprecycle.org to provide a one-stop source of information about recycling lamps (the term used in the lighting industry to refer to all types of light bulbs).


Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs), and with other energy-efficient lighting such as linear fluorescent and high intensity discharge (HID) lamps contain a very small amount of mercury, an element essential to achieving energy savings. While these lamps help consumers and businesses cut their lighting energy usage and reduce energy costs, it is important that any product containing mercury be properly managed when it becomes waste to protect public health and the environment.

Easy and convenient options exist for both businesses and consumers to recycle waste mercury-containing lamps. It is estimated that businesses already recycle over 30% of their waste lamps annually and consumers are embracing lamp recycling as they switch to more efficient lighting technologies. www.lamprecycle.org

PROFESSIONAL LIGHTING : LED Controllers








Wednesday, 14 January 2015

Light Color Temperatures in the Kelvin Scale

The color temperature of a light source is the temperature of an ideal black-body radiator that radiates light of comparable hue to that of the light source. Color temperature is a characteristic of visible light that has important applications in lighting, photography, videography, publishing, manufacturing, astrophysics, horticulture, and other fields. In practice, color temperature is only meaningful for light sources that do in fact correspond somewhat closely to the radiation of some black body, i.e., those on a line from reddish/orange via yellow and more or less white to blueish white; it does not make sense to speak of the color temperature of, e.g., a green or a purple light. Color temperature is conventionally stated in the unit of absolute temperature, the Kelvin, having the unit symbol K.

Color temperatures over 5,000K are called cool colors (bluish white), while lower color temperatures (2,700–3,000 K) are called warm colors (yellowish white through red).[1] This relation, however, is a psychological one in contrast to the physical relation implied by Wien's displacement law, according to which the spectral peak is shifted towards shorter wavelengths (resulting in a more blueish white) for higher temperatures. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature