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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.
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
Heat and temperature are not the same thing. If it produces 140 lumens per watt, I believe that makes it something like 50% efficient (which is insanely high for lighting). That means a 100 watt lightbulb of this technology would turn 50 watts or so into heat, and 50 watts or so into light. A 100 watt incandescant is turning 85 watts into heat and 15 watts into light. So even if it runs at a higher temperature, its confined to a very small space.
This isn't dangerous at all.
To the contrary. The eye's range of sensitivity is tuned to the solar spectrum, emitted at a blackbody temperature just a bit below 6000 K. A bulb is most efficient if it emits light in the spectrum that the eye is sensitive to, and not in, say the infrared spectrum. So a bulb emitting blackbody spectrum becomes more efficient as the emission temperature goes up, and peaks in efficiency at around 6000.
Incandescent bulbs are not inefficient because they are too hot-- they are inefficient because they are not hot enough. They run somewhere about 2500 or 3000, and hence most of the light is emitted in the infrared, not the visible.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
WTFV (watch the .. video). The temperature they're talking about really is 6000K in heat.
As other shave pointed out, this is not too much of a problem for household use as ordinary incandescents reach 3600 at the filament. You just need to encase it in a glass bulb.
Lights are not on all of the time. if less than 12 hours use which is likely than your calculations put the life at 5 years in a street light configuration.
In light physics, temperature and color temperature are the same thing. Color temperature refers to the temperature at which an ideal black body radiator will emit such a spectrum. This unit is obviously a temperature.
Moreover, this lamp appears to be a high bandwidth lamp -- "full spectrum" as they said. This implies that it does not depend on the absorbsion and emission characteristics of specific atoms. Lamps like these -- fluorescents, high efficiency sodium lamps, and the like -- emit light at discrete wavelengths. High bandwidth lamps depend on incandescence to produce light. Indeed, color temperature doesn't make sense for these kinds of lamps -- no black body radiator will emit discrete spectra. (There's a "corrected" color temperature unit for these lamps used in the lighting trade)
The point is: these lamps get hot. They reach about 6000K.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Sounds like the company has $40 million in funding. So one bulb costs $40 million.
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.
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.