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A Super-Efficient Light Bulb
Chroniton writes with news of a Silicon Valley company, Luxim, that has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, almost ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours. There's no mention of mercury or other heavy metals, which pose a problem for compact fluorescents.
but can I use it in a grow-op?
Great, people lighting their properties with more bright lights is just what we need. Light pollution is already a serious probably (it's destroyed amateur astronmy, see Mizon's Light Pollution ). Instead of showing people how they can make do with less lights, we're just making it cheaper for private individuals to duplicate the Las Vegas strip.
Such high operating temperatures would not be acceptable for domestic use - the risk of fire would simply be too great. But commercial use, specifically for streetlights as the summary mentions, would be ideal. The amount of power consumed by streetlights world-wide must be staggering, so any improvement in efficiency, even in just this single area of light generation, would be substantial.
Better known as 318230.
So...how much does it cost compared to an incandescent? Or an LED?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I found it interesting that the tiny bulb - at least in the video - was still using 250 watts and internally generated a temperature of 6000K (no they weren't talking color temp; they were talking actual temp). Now that's certainly lower than the 400 watt conventional streetlight they compared it to; but there's no mention in the video about scalability or low-power use. So the submitter's comment about it having advantages over compact fluorescents may have no basis in fact.
#DeleteChrome
I went to the link, but it was just an obnoxious video ad. And no, I didn't sit through it.
I know that a lot of the stories on here are ads in disguise, but this one isn't even hiding. I didn't realize that slashdot was an a linking to unabashed ads now.
The company makes many different forms of lighting including projectors http://www.luxim.com/ A home projector with 10 times the bulb life would let me watch just that much more porn in my mom's basement.......
Thats a bright idea.
http://www.fullspectrumsolutions.com/cri_explained.htm
Provides a table of other light sources for comparison and a bit of discussion about color theory.but to answer your point, yes a six thousand degree F bulb would be impractical for home use.
The "nasty police helicopters" link is no bueno. No clicking!
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
But isn't 20,000 hours only a little more than 2 years?
365 * 24 == 8760
20,000 / 8760 == 2.283
Is that right, or am I way off?
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
> Such high operating temperatures would not be acceptable for domestic use
> - the risk of fire would simply be too great.
Don't be silly. 6000K is the internal temperature of the gas. The filament in an incandescent lamp can reach 3000K. What matters is the external temperature, which is likely to be lower for a more efficient lamp.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
No different than any plasma given off by an Arc welder.
Hazardous UV. You get quite a sunburn like some welders.
Not good for the eyes either. All wasted energy too.
6000K? Who cares? The thing is, this bulb is generating about 10 times the lumens per watt of input power as a standard incandescent. That means that it is dissipating more energy in the form of light and less in the form of heat. Regardless of the internal temperature of the plasma, how "hot" the bulb gets is really a function of the actual dissipated energy. For instance, a spark of static electricity has an extremely high "temperature" but it doesn't burn you. Granted, some of that energy might be occuring in the infra-red range, but I doubt it will be any hotter than a normal bulb.
Also, if you look at HPS (high-pressure sodium vapor) lamps, the orange ones they use for street lights, the vessel that produces the light is actually quite small. There is an internal tube (made of quartz, I think) that holds the sodium. For the first few minutes, the bulb appears blue because you are seeing an arc in the center of it. After the sodium boils and then turns into a plasma, it is in a higher energy state and starts throwing off photons.
The only difference in this bulb is they are eliminating the electrodes and using a different plasma. They use a high frequency RF that's tuned to the resonate frequency of the gas. Sort of like a microwave does for water, but this is more focused. The gas resonates and becomes a plasma. Then it starts throwing off photons. Your efficiency is limited by how efficiently you can make your RF circuit and amplifier and how focused you can place the RF. I imagine they are quoting the theoretical efficiency but they probably haven't achieved it yet.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Answer is (probably) you'd need more of them to heat your house than standard bulbs. This is more efficient at converting energy into light, so it actually produces less heat than a light bulb. It may get to 6000K, but only at a very small point, so the amount of heat produced is quite small. A big radiator full of hot water will be more effective in terms of heat output. A radiator has huge size but a lower output per unit volume, whereas this has a very small volume but a high temperature.
It also says 6000K at its center; I'm not sure whether it transmits that heat to the casing or not.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Full spectrum with an Ar plasma at 6000K ~= 0.5 eV? Yes, you can get a lot of light out of it and it looks white, but I wouldn't call it a full spectrum. There are mostly peaks in the region 900-1500 (I don't have a spectra right in front of me right now, so from memory). But I could be wrong of course.
Why would we need street lights with a very strong light source using the same spectrum as the sun? What about putting one of these into a beamer instead? Or stadium lights? Every time somebody comes up with a great invention, they seem to want to use it for the weirdest things. Bright sun-light lite disturbs the wildlife anyway, bad idea...
per your link...... LED-based lighting is safer and far more efficient than the Luxim device. Hmm the efficiencies listed state 100 lumen's per watt the parent shows 140l/W seems like leds are not far more efficient. I realize that the article taht you linked doesn't have the most up to date stats on leds and that the recent led bulbs are better that the eiki link but not that much better.... And I am not sure where safer comes from
1. Scalability - will it scale for use in domestic lighting?
:)
2. Color temperature - will it do warm white or something similarly pleasant?
3. Argon... isn't that toxic? (since the summary mentioned hazardous materials but didn't point that out, high school chem is so long ago..)
4. Price if none of the above are problematic
5. Time to market.
If someone can answer those, I'll be genuinely interested
I have spoken'eth.
Full spectrum high efficiency lights would be a major boon to the pot.... I mean industrial hemp growers.
With an operating temperature of 6000k how many do I need to heat my house?
That won't work, because the temperature it reaches has nothing to do with the amount of heat it emmits. Besides, if it's almost 10 times as efficient as ordinary bulbs, you would have 10 times as much light to get the same heat. You would get warm, but I doubt you would able to sleep with that much light.
So say we all
Sounds like the company has $40 million in funding. So one bulb costs $40 million.
One of the problems of current LED and other low-energy bulbs is that they're no good for indoor cultivation of plants. Using lights which require less power and produce less heat are less detectable than regular indoor grow lights. I wonder if these lights are the answer?
OK, so plasma is not very close to an ideal black body, but regardless you still get some wide spectrum emissions with a peak near that of a corresponding black body. In this case (6000 Kelvin), that's a pretty nice white.
A few points, inspired by those "insightful" comments i read till up to now
a) Temperature=!heat=!"OMG IT WILL KILL US!!!". You dont really want to know the "temperature" of the electron beam in your old style TV... (yeah, i know its not in thermodynamical equilibrium, and thus temperature is not defined, thus the "")
b) This is nothing really new. It is based on the same principle like the old sulfure-plasma lamps in the early 90s.
c) It doesnt scale down well. It needs its power provided by microwaves, which is not efficiently possible in the lower power range.
d) Yeah, it uses 250W. But provides as much light as a 1500W halogen thrower. Wake up, moms basement (which you are most familiar with) isnt the world, there are plenty of things you would like to have 10ks of lumens for.
e) Reinforced from d: Yeah, a 250W bulb can be energy efficent. Because it puts out a fucking lot light, numbnut.
f) Doesnt compare at all with leds: Leds have low surface brightness, are effiecent and dont scale UP well. This things have a very high surface brightness, are efficient and dont scape DOWN well. Apple, meet orange.
g) A better comparison would be vs HID: there they are supperior (longer lifetime, less dangerous, not much more complex driver (HIDs need a high-voltage ballast, too).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
There must be two dozen posts here already blathering about 6000K and nobody bothered to go read the company's official documentation? Here's their website, here are a whole bunch of specs and videos, now go read something before speculating.
However, their light, much like the light of this light, looks an awful lot like the light from a welder. You have to be careful about the pursuit of the almighty lumen -- it's a human-tweaked measure, not a physical measure, and lights score best by dumping all of their light into green. We probably don't want our homes to be lit by exclusively green light.
One thing to note is that there is wide spectrum (true 6000K, this new light), wide spectrum (white LEDs, a relatively smooth blob in the optical frequencies), and wide spectrum (a strategically chosen selection single frequencies, in fluorescent lights). This new bulb should produce very nice looking like, but it might benefit from some of the same phosphors used in white LEDs to down-convert the higher frequencies.
Properly run LEDs are claimed to have lifetimes in the range of 70,000 to 100,000 hours of use, and are not affected by rapid cycling (in fact, the recommended method for dimming them is to switch them on and off very quickly).
I wish people would challenge memes like these, because they're mostly bullshit crafted to stir up/reinforce discontent, in this case by the right-wing noise machine against "environmentalists", because that sells newspapers. /. post) are there for the hyper-paranoid, and apply just as much to the regular old-school fluorescent tubes (moreso, since they contain more mercury).
CFLs, like all fluorescent lights, do contain a miniscule amount of mercury (and I do mean miniscule; about 4 mg), but to call it a problem is to vastly overstate the dangers involved. If you break a bulb, you may want to open a window for a bit, but that's about it. The clean-up steps the EPA mentions on their website (mentioned in the linked
The "problem" is serious enough that if you have a large population that uses CFLs (like places where incandescents aren't allowed anymore), you want to encourage people to dispose of them safely rather than to just throw them with the rest of the trash, but even if the mercury does end up in the environment, it will be less mercury than has been prevented from getting out by its power savings (Wikipedia has this picture, which demonstrates the principle for coal plants, but the same thing applies to other types of power plants, except "green" ones like hydroelectric and wind energy; but again, this is only relevant if the bulbs are disposed of unsafely, which is illegal in many places that mandate their use).
I can't believe people are modding you insightful. First, where does it say that anyone is stopping work on curing cancer? I must have missed that in the article.
Second, this thing saves power, which is typically a good thing (TM). Why, with the power we save, we might even have more resources to look for a cure for cancer!
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
The benefits:
The Drawbacks:
They definately have some good applications, like for use in stadiums, airports, etc. However, I think there needs to be more research done to make them usable in homes and automobiles.
For any blackbody emitter (incandescent light bulb or this fancy new plasma), the color temperature IS the temperature. It's only for things that don't emit like blackbody radiators (fluorescent and LED) where you have a different color temperature than temperature.
We already have the technology to halve the power usage of street lights. It's called an off switch.
OK maybe not quite half, perhaps cut by a third. Why do we need near daylight conditions for drivers at 2 in the morning, when they have perfectly good headlights?
but rather, because we have these rare pieces of real estate called sidewalks, and people who actually use them for walking.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
A while back Cringely had a post about what sounds like a similar tech from Fusion Lighting and one of the drawbacks that he pointed out was that every one of those bulbs became a RF emitter in the 2.4Ghz range and thus would interfere with WiFi and the other numerous devices that use that unlicensed spectrum. This sounds very similiar, but so far no mention of the interference problem. Anybody know if this has the same issues? If it does, then it could be a polluter in both the visible light (as pointed out by many posts above) and RF ranges.
Time to add nimp.org to your hosts file. The link is an auto redirect from rds.yahoo.com to members.on.nimp.org. This is how Yahoo redirects search results to find out who clicked what. Yawho? search results are thus no longer safe to click. For best results, add rds.yahoo.com to your hosts file or equivalent blocker as well.
members.on.nimp.org resolves to poulet0.zoy.org. The IP address is [80.65.228.130]. Best to block that as well. The DNS administrator for this server is Slashdot User "Sam H", UID 3979.
Somebody at slashdot should have a look at our anonymous coward's IP address. It would be nice if we could quit this nonsense. I hope this isn't some troll that bought a low UID in the auction.
And maybe some slashdotter in Paris could call Sam and ask him to fix his compromised server. It does look like someone truly nasty took it over in August of 2005. Big Debian fan this one. Likes the GNAA routine and the whole bit.
I'm not certain about pinning this on Sam. sam.zoy.org resolves to a different IP. One of you intertubes wizards want to weigh in here?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'd rather they spent the money on better quality sidewalks and let our eyes do what they were made to do - adjust to the light.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
As a former astronomer, that is patently obvious. However, humanity goes like moths to the lights. It is really hard to teach the average citizen that cutting the luminosity by 80% but tripling the number of lights will make an area much more safe. There is some bizarre connection between bright and safe, when "uniformly lit" would be far, far more safe, regardless of the brightness.
I'm reminded of a time in my youth, when I was traveling by car with a group of friends. One road out of town has intense streetlights, spaced some distance apart. The darkness between them is amazing. As I blew down the road, definitely "under the speed limit" should any adult have asked, I came across a large, black dog, midway between two streetlights. I swerved across the road, onto the shoulder, and narrowly missed a mailbox and a tree. My friends behind me in another car had no idea what I was doing, until they also almost hit the dog.
No matter how bright they make those streetlights, until there is *uniform* brightness, there will be danger. I wish I knew how to clearly point this out to people.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Doesn't beat White LEDs at 300 lumens per watt.
Apparently Sam is a debian developer of some major projects.
If you're interested, the links on the left at that page give some interesting depth of background. He has a long and interesting history.
Be careful with this stuff. The above link goes to his server and they can be changed at any time. They appear to be harmless at the time I'm writing this though. Some of the content is NSFW.
He's apparently a big deal in IT.
It's possible his server's been owned, but if somebody did that, they did a remarkably convincing job of integrating the bad into the good.
I'm torn here. Responsible geek reaches his dotage at the ripe old age of 30? Trolls have decided to reach over into illegal activity? Some combination of the above? I regret I lack the time and tools to look into it further.
We'll just have to be more careful.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I missed your thread.
Certain aspects of this troll may be illegal in some jurisdictions. I don't know for sure - I'm not in law enforcement. It may not actually be a virus, but only a file that contains a signature. I'm not going to fire up a VM and infect it just to find out. Using Yahoo for URL obfuscation is interesting, though.
I also did not say that he is the actor here -- only that he's the DNS administrator for the server involved, and that novices shouldn't toy with such levels of uncertainty unless they accept the risks.
Sam Hocevar is a valuable member of the community. My initial concern was that this was some compromised server that should be fixed and then some curiosity about what was going on. If it happened that Sam got his amusement trolling the internet, well, I guess I could get over the inconvenience of blocking his site. Note that I'm not saying that this is the case -- just that if it were, then I'm no longer interested in the issue. I would think that someone with this level of skill would cover his tracks better if he cared to. Professional trolling can be an unpleasant but instructive laboratory in the field of social dynamics. I'm not interested enough in the field to engage in it myself, but as long as they keep it legal I don't have a problem with it.
Cmdr Taco does a good job of structuring Slashdot so these folks can be modded down quickly and disappear unless you're looking for them. In fact, we probably shouldn't be discussing the trolls at all. They thrive on the attention. That's all I've got to say about this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.