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Photonic Structure Increases Light Bulb Efficiency
An Anonymous Coward writes "A new experimental microscopic tungsten lattice
can increase the efficiency of an incandescent
electric bulb from 5 percent to greater than
60 percent. This is done by converting waste
heat into visible light. "
According to the article "The work was performed with a photonic crystal operating in the mid-infrared range". Though the author states further that there are no known obstacles to downgrade into the visible light range, why did they start in the Infrared spectrum to begin with?
couldn't resist:
Q: How many programmers does it take to change a broken light bulb?
A: None, it's a hardware problem.
Where I work the beatings usually continue until the morale and efficiency improve.
Here now, 600% more efficient than normal bulbs and also getting very cheap. They also switch on more gradually, making them less painful on the eyes.
The coolest element of them all..
If you don't belive me read the book "Uncle Tungsten".
Great book, a must for anyone remotly intrested
in chemistry or the history of chemistry.
Ok, so it's a shameless plug.. but I just had to push that damn fine book.
When mine eye falls upon that light
mine heart turns dark for the unmourned waste
when in history we once feared night
and strove to banish it, with undue haste
that good man Edison born forth the device
which only made use of one in twenty
driven by power that which was low in price
and of that juice there would be plenty
now science improves upon that thought
with a tungsten lattice that uses three in five
hidden with answers we long have sought
was the mythic efficiency for which we strive
And nothing remains of that electricity hog
Save twenty-two billion metric tonnes of smog
Give the idea to General Electric. Given their experience with lighting systems, they could probably make the new lightbulb design economically practical in a few years.
Imagine the efficiency of flourescent lightbulbs without the initial high cost--a lot of people would love to buy such a lightbulb.
Three-dimensional (3D) metallic crystals are promising photonic bandgap structures: they can possess a large bandgap, new electromagnetic phenomena can be explored , and high-temperature (above 1,000 C) applications may be possible. However, investigation of their photonic bandgap properties is challenging, especially in the infrared and visible spectrum, as metals are dispersive and absorbing in these regions. Studies of metallic photonic crystals have therefore mainly concentrated on microwave and millimetre wavelengths. Difficulties in fabricating 3D metallic crystals present another challenge, although emerging techniques such as self-assembly may help to resolve these problems. Here we report measurements and simulations of a 3D tungsten crystal that has a large photonic bandgap at infrared wavelengths (from about 8 to 20 m). A very strong attenuation exists in the bandgap, 30 dB per unit cell at 12 m. These structures also possess other interesting optical properties; a sharp absorption peak is present at the photonic band edge, and a surprisingly large transmission is observed in the allowed band, below 6 m. We propose that these 3D metallic photonic crystals can be used to integrate various photonic transport phenomena, allowing applications in thermophotovoltaics and blackbody emission.
Doesn't this look like some explanation: the material (unlike metals) has a bandgap, i.e., is insulating and cannot absorb or emit radiation at low frequencies. So the energy has to be dissipated at higher (visible) frequencies. Apparently the output is higher than naive calculations would predict. So the puzzle is not why the frequency of the emitted light is so high, but why the output is so strong for a given temperature.
Because I sure did.
To avoid having this fall into the hands of Westinghouse or GE, do not create a company and go public.
...or get an identifiable tatoo on your ass.
It's the only way to save the world.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Not generating heat to begin with?
I wonder how this compares to modern flourescent light fixtures.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
light bulb wastes power
tungsten evaporating:
produce more photons!
And what about when my daughter finds a birds nest that has fallen out of a tree and we need to fabricate a incubator out of a box and a 25 watt light bulb to keep it warm?
This is horrible news. Think of the children. Call your congressman and ban this insanity.
A 60% efficient incandescent bulb would have a whole lot of applications beyond just saving money on the power bill.
Think projector lamps: Think about the waste heat they wouldn't generate. Think about the cooling fans they won't need. Imagine a 40-watt bulb throwing as much light as a 500 watt bulb does today.
I sure hope this hits the market sometime SOON.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Does anyone understand article far enough to tell if this can be used for example to convert some light from one wavelength to other, and increase solar cell efficiency?
AFAIK, solar cells only use some wavelengths efficiently, other are wasted.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
60% is positively huge, although I wonder how cheaply they'll be able to put microscopic tungsten lattices in flashlight bulbs and relatia.
Much more profound though is that they're basically talking about a device that converts heat into light: The ramifications and applications of that are wide ranging and staggering. Getting even more "goofy", could you have a heat->light conversion, followed by a light->electricity conversion? (i.e. a small "heat energy recovery system").
Blue's shorter wavelength.
Older fluorescent technologies maybe but the current crop of products in the shops come in different colours and shades of light.
Phillips for instance do a fluorescent bulb which they describe as warm white is the same shape and is only fractionally bigger than a normal bulb. Fits in a standard socket and lasts for, well, 5 years in my case.
The bulbs are still more expensive than normal ones but you save in buying replacements and in electricity costs.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
That'd be Philips even.
i li psSelect?select=_SP4&java=on&choice=0
http://www.eur.lighting.philips.com/servlets/Ph
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The science of turning electric power into light has really changed in the past decade. I've seen a graph in one of my engineering trade journals showing the efficency of LEDs in lumens per watt. Just a decade ago, the best LEDs were two orders of magnitude less efficent than flourescent bulbs. Now, the new generation of blue and white LEDs are more efficent than flourescent, and are approching the levels of low pressure sodium lights.
If we extrapolate from the given 5%->60% levels given in the article, that would raise incandescent lights to nearly the levels of flourescent, without the warm-up time flourescent has.
Now, the problem with LED vs. flourescent is cost - LEDs are much more expensive in terms of lumens per doller than flourescent. Would microstructured tungsten be any cheaper?
www.eFax.com are spammers
This would make for an incredibly cheap and effective night vision system with a small battery and a CCD camera. IR floodlight with 60% efficiency... mmmmmm.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The few people who tried flourescent bulbs correctly noted that they can be harsh light. This doesn't have to be the case.
Economics works against flourescent bulbs... generally you have a choice in sizes, but there aren't any choices in "mood" (soft, tinted, etc).
The answer of course is reflected light, or otherwise hiding the bulb. Lampshades and light bounced off the ceiling works great. Not to mention, these things *greatly* reduce the air conditioner strain during the summer (I used to live without AC, but New England summers are rather hot now.).
It's sad that standard incandescent lightbulbs are not efficency-regulated out of existence. You pay LESS for efficent lighting, if you factor in all the increased energy taxes which come about due to pollution.
Now all they have to do is combining that technology with CPUs. Cool running processors that light up your computer from inside! Sombody call Apple ;-)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
but it's true that by buying something else than SUVs and 7.9l engine cars
USian drivers buy SUVs because they don't want to get hurt in a potential wreck with an SUV.
stupid speed limitations! (Which are here precisely because cars' engines eat too much!)
Actually, U.S. roadways have speed limits because of the reaction time of the average USian driver, especially taking into account effects such as highway hypnosis.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of course, watts are a measure of consumption, not output. The entire premise of measuring light output via the bulbs power consumption is wrong.
Yes, very true. But try exaplaining that to Joe Sixpack who doesn't even understand the difference and relationship between Joule, Watt and Watt hour.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
Incandescent lamps... around 20 lumens per watt. Fluorescent lamps... about 70 lumens per watt. White LED, 50 lumens per watt and climbing. And the power requirements and ability to fit them into small spaces are much less tricky than for fluorescent.
LED's are almost there--and efficiencies are climbing. Main problem right now is that they're expensive. But already, I see they're being used for the red, and, increasingly, the green lights in traffic lights around here.
By the time this stuff makes it out of the lab, LEDs will be cheap and even more efficient than they are now.
And, of course, all the gee-whiz wizards-of-the-labs articles never say how much the new technology is likely to COST. And the stated efficiencies tend to decline as the devices start to approach reality...
If they can really make these things twelve times as efficient as LED's AND give a pleasant, flattering light spectrum AND get the cost down, it will be interesting.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I think the greenhouse effect has more to do with absorption than with angle of incidence. Blackbody emission peak wavelength decreases with temperature. The Sun, a 6000 K blackbody, emits visible light, which passes through the windows and is absorbed by the interior. The interior, a 300 K blackbody, emits infrared, which is absorbed by the windows.
In his autobiography, 19th century instrument maker John A. Brashear describes a project to make lenses out of salt crystals for an astronomer who wanted to make infrared observations. Salt is supposed to be much more transparent than glass in that band of the spectrum.
A breakthrough in solar energy ?
I wonder what the energy density from the sun is in the IR spectrum ?
Absolute statements are never true
Bzzzzz. Wrong. Sorry. Thanks for playing. :-)
Fluorescents certainly do not top out at 12 - 15%. Most flourescents exceed 75% efficiency! Sometimes they even hit close to 80%.
The new models use electronic balasts, so they don't flicker at the frequency of the powersupply. And they start instantly, too. (altho for some reason a bunch of them require a 1 to 2-minute warmup period to reach full strength.)
And you can buy fluorescent bulbs that emit soft, warm light (instead of the traditional harsh, cold light of long tube fluorescents.)
Now if this new technology that's being pimped in the article in this thread ultimately exceeds 80% efficiency, then I'm switching to this new technology (assuming it is cost effective). Until then, fluorescents all the way baby!!
There's no such thing as a USian.
You see, some countries in the world are called "The United States of X". Generally because, accurately or otherwise, they're supposedly a federal union of autonomous "states".
People who live in one of these "United States" countries are called after the place where the states are located.
Citizens of the United States of Mexico are called.... Mexicans.
Citizens of the United States of Brazil are called.... Brazilians.
Citizens of the United States of America are called.... Americans.
But the entire Western Hemisphere should be called "America"! It's unfair that just the USA uses that name!
Unfair in what way? Brazil doesn't lack a name. Canada's not hurting for a moniker unrelated to the name of its continent.
Besides, geographical names are blurry anyway. By "Africa'' a lot of people mean simply "sub-Saharan Africa". Peru used to mean all of non-Brazilian South America, not just one Andean country. Some names (e.g. Iraq, Pakistan) are simply made up out of nowhere.
So why invent the ugly term "USian", which could equally well apply to several different countries, when everybody the world over knows what an "American" is?
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
If that were true, a 40-watt flourescent tube would output ~20000 lumens, not ~3000.
100% efficiency would be about 680 lumens per watt. Flourescents do about 80, incandescents do about 18.
Oh, and misspelling words like "flourescent" and "ballast" hurts your credibility.
This is Sandia. One of those governement labs with supercomputers and stuff. Like ASCI Red, the world's 3rd fastest supercomputer, for example.
They've got an OC-48 2.5 Gbps link to San Francisco. That was in 2000, they may have upgraded since then...
yeah, I know, they may have outsourced the web server to a 56k modem line, but somehow I doubt it...
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
True, but sooner or later, all the light even from one of these new bulbs turns into heat -- except for that light which escapes out the windows.
-- Alastair
Granted this is on the heels of the bubble fusion article
But this is superlatively revolutionary. Take the two possible big-hit applications: massive energy efficiencies coupled with a 20-30% increase in photovotalic efficiency (read: reduced cost) and this is a big step toward alternative energy.
Imagine a mass-produced fuel cells and increased efficiency photovotalics with lighting generated by these things. Who needs a power company?
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Since converting to compact flourescent bulbs at home over the past three years, I've often wondered why projectors still use incandescant bulbs. I certainly won't be buying a projector for home use until the problem of cooling is solved. Having brought a few projectors home to try, I've found that the noise from cooling fans outweighs the benefit of the big screen.
:-)
Cool stuff. Literally.
Much more profound though is that they're basically talking about a device that converts heat into light: The ramifications and applications of that are wide ranging and staggering.
Remember a couple years back when we invented fire? Yeah, that funny little orangish/yellowish glow from the air around the wood, that's kind of the same principle.
This is great work. But if people want high-efficiency, pleasant-looking light-bulbs, they can already get them and save money in the process. The fact that people don't buy them despite all their advantages suggests that the problem isn't technology, it's people.
The reason we use incandescent lamps for projectors is that you need a point source to be able to focus the image. A flourescent source is too large (a 13W biax lamp would need to be 60" away from a projector to focus the image!), but metal halide lamps work well for high wattages.
What is amazing is that this is about 3x more efficient than flourescent or High Intensity Discharge lamps! That doesn't quite sound possible... but that is what they are saying!
I think the color of the light produced would be very important for its potential uses.
Ha.
So if we have a United States of Africa, do we call them African? How about United States of Asia? Asians?
You get the point?
What point? Hypothetical countries need hypothetical names?
But, sure, we can play that game. Let's say we had a hypothetical federation of European nations, which we'll call the "European Union". What are people from within this Union supposedly called? Europeans. What about places which are in Europe but not in the European Union, like Norway? Norwegians.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Yes, there's a Heinlein book called The Man who Sold the Moon. It's a collection of Future History stories, with the story "The Man who Sold the Moon" as its "title track".
I've never read it, because I assumed that The Past Through Tomorrow contained all the Future History stories.
Because some idiot decided that there needed to be 3600 seconds in an hour, and so using a 100W device for an hour somehow uses 360kJ of energy.
If your target audience uses a calculator to get fifty percent of a hundred, you don't want to inflict our silly Sumerian time scale on them. (Was it the Sumerians who did the base-sixty nonsense? Or was that the Babylonians?)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
a computer system could run on a couple of W if you could reclaim all of the heat it generates
Minus light from the monitor and the whirring sounds, a computer would practically be a perpetual motion machine if you could reclaim all of the heat it generates. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics don't permit full recovery like that.
So that white powder inside the tubes is flour? Cool; I've always wondered what that stuff was...
C'mon, it's obvious he knows how to spell it, and just made a typo--he spelled it correctly 4 of the 5 times. Whereas you misspelled it 3 of out 3 times. 3 strikes and you're out!
Is there some entropic reason why light cannot be turned into electricity? We know about heat, but not about light. Is there even somewhere to start with the whole S=k ln W thing? I asked a couple of physics professors around here, but no one really seemed to know. I think it might be an open research topic. Someone should do a bunch of math on the subject.
References, anyone?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
heat->light->electricity conversion?
You've got entropy working against you.
What they're doing is reducing the effects of entropy by something like blocking undesirable radiation from occurring.
Check your own math before you get pedantic, please..
The article is talking about improving the efficiency from 5% to 60%, not improving the efficiency *by* 60%.
So, if 60% of the power going into this new filament is emitted as visible light, then a 40-watt bulb will be about as bright as today's 500-watt bulb.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'll get fuel efficient when someone provides me a fuel efficient vehicle that can do decent battle in a collision
I would be really surprised if SUVs are actually safer than a regular car on the whole. I don't think i'd ever seen a rollover on city streeets until SUVs became popular--vehicles on their side or top used to be a sight only seen in severe highway accidents, but apparently it's practical to tip or flip a SUV at 35-45 mph judging from a recent accident or two.
And when they hit get hit hard, they get twisted up just like a family car.
--
Benjamin Coates
The only way a technology such as this would be accepted by big manufactures is if they have a short life span.
You conspiracy freaks are so delusional sometimes. There are multi year bulbs you can buy right in the store, you know?
C//
Obviously not, otherwise you would have just invalidated any variety of thermal/steam engines with a stroke of your "can't decrease entropy" pen.
C//
In addition to the fact that a projector needs a point source, a fluorescent lamp also wouldn't have the right color spectrum to make the projected image look right. Although I suppose that could be adjusted for to some degree.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I would be really surprised if SUVs are actually safer than a regular car on the whole.
No, I'm pretty sure they're not. They have longer braking distances and poorer maneuverability than cars, in addition to their rollover problems. Also, they tend to be more rigid in construction, which seems as if they wouldn't absorb collision energy as effectively as a car with all its "crumple zones". Their only advantage is sheer size, which is negated because of the numbers of them on the road (you're driving a big vehicle, but you're more likely to collide with another big vehicle). In fact, some SUV drivers obviously get some sort of "invulnerability complex" when they get behind the wheel, causing them to be a greater danger to themselves and others on the road.
Anyone who thinks size = safety has obviously never seen an Indy car driver walk away from the mangled wreckage of his car after a 200+mph crash.
Note: I don't think SUVs should be banned, or that everyone that drives one is an idiot. They do have their uses, and for some folks they may nearly be a necessity. There are a lot of folks, though, that buy them for no good reason, and it is these people that I dearly wish would get a clue.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
An 8 pin DIP and a 15A+ Triac. (If there isn't an existing chip for it, volume sales would make it worthwhile to make one.) Lightbulbs always blow when you switch them on, never during usage.
There have been recifier gimicks for lamp sockets, but I doubt those do very much.
I put this idea in the public domain (not that I can copyright ideas), and all that I (hopefully) ask for is a bunch of these (for site testing) so that I don't have to keep replacing those damned bulbs!
How many hardware engineers does it take to not change a lightbulb?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.