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Laser Blast Makes Regular Light Bulbs Super-Efficient
guruevi writes with news that a process using an ultra-powerful laser can crank up the efficiency of everyday incandescent light bulbs. Using the same laser process covered several years ago, the tungsten filament has an array of nano- and micro-scale structures formed on the surface making the resulting light as bright as a 100-watt bulb while consuming less electricity than a 60-watt bulb and remaining much cheaper to produce. "The key to creating the super-filament is an ultra-brief, ultra-intense beam of light called a femtosecond laser pulse. The laser burst lasts only a few quadrillionths of a second. To get a grasp of that kind of speed, consider that a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 32 million years. During its brief burst, Guo's laser unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America onto a spot the size of a needle point. That intense blast forces the surface of the metal to form nanostructures and microstructures that dramatically alter how efficiently light can radiate from the filament."
Laser Blast Makes Regular Light Bulbs Super-Efficient
So that whole time in Star Wars, they were just trying to make each other Super-Efficient? That's a whole lot nicer than what I was led to believe was initially going on.
LASIK makes a lot more sense now too.
I'm learning!
My work here is dung.
So, considering they are as cheap to produce as normal lightbulbs, we can expect to see these on the shelves in...2050?
But it doesn't matter (at least to those of us in the USA), because in 2014 incandescent bulbs will be banned.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Of only white LEDs were this efficient as well...oh wait...never mind.
Ezekiel 23:20
The technique has been used to make extremely efficient light-absorbing surfaces; but hadn't been applied to light-emitting surfaces until now. Since those are two sides of the same coin, I'd have expected somebody to try it much sooner(though, I'll admit, I didn't think of it).
On the plus side, greater efficiency in incandescents is always good(though I'd be quite interested to know how cheap laser treating filaments can possibly be). I predict that this thread will probably be infested by the "CCFLs are Evil!" brigade soon enough...
... and remaining much cheaper to produce.
... Guo's laser unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America onto a spot the size of a needle point.
What?
Whale
Why not set an efficiency factor on a bulb(like cafe standards) instead of banning the different technologies?
Something I never understood.
Too bad we won't be able to buy Incandescents any more in a couple years.... :-(
http://www.formplusfunction.com/blog/2009/will-incandescent-bulbs-soon-be-outlawed/
unless they can get the new bulbs to 70% less power used.
The clock is ticking to 2014 (when 40watts are outlawed).
sorry for the link, didn't have time to find a reputable site...
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Too late: Compact fluorescent lamps require about 20W for the same light output as a 100W incadescent.
And live longer too.
Yes, their light used to look shitty, but these times are over now as well - if you don't buy the cheapest
there are, the light out of fluorescent bulbs is perfectly fine. And LED "bulbs" may soon be there too.
Am I the only one who thought of this?
and it only takes 11 years of operating the more efficient bulb to compensate for the energy consumed during the laser burst
This is the might Slash. We can understand proper units.
Femto = 10^-15
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
But long does the lamp last? It's easy to make an incandescent lamp more efficient. You just crank up the filament temp, but then your lifetime goes to pot. Lamps last 1000 hours because that's how frequently consumers are willing to unscrew and rescrew their bulbs.
So, a standard incandescent bulb puts out something like 10-15% of the energy input as visible light? ...and this process boosts that up to maybe 15-25% efficiency?
This is interesting from a materials science perspective and for lighting technology in the near-term, but hardly what I'd call super-efficient. Wake me up in a couple years when they have the bugs worked out of LED lighting...
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
These bulbs are super efficient in the same way that racehorses are super fast. Compared to newer technologies, not so much; but pretty damn good compared to their fellows(particularly impressive in that lightbulbs have been a mature technology for some time).
No, that's just a mainstream news unit of measure. We now have football fields, libraries of congress (LOCs), swimming pools (for area?), and the entire power output of the north american energy grid.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Perhaps it operates more efficiently, but it doesn't sound like it is so efficient to produce. Unless I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting the verbiage from the summary.
You forgot that femtosecond part. The usage of the whole USA grid is for an incredibly tiny fraction of a second, 10^15 of a second. The USA grid is 4x10^15 watts. So really, if you want to translate it into a more sane energy understanding, its about four watts per bulb to do this.
This is my sig.
GE and Philips have already bought and payed for the public perception of which types of lightbulbs are green, and which ones make you a remorseless monster who's worse than hitler.
Hint: the 'green' one is the one with the enormous profit margin.
Oh, that's easy to answer. It's a tag. Makes it easy to spot where people have been bought to push certain agendas and fill pockets. Let me just ask you this: Do you think profit margins on old-school bulbs are a) smaller or b) larger than on more modern alternatives?
Whenever legislation is worded in such a way that it does not encourage competition to reach a certain goal, you can bet your cute fanny that the true goal of said legislation lies not in the stated goal but in the way as to get there.
That's basically why I'm for voting for politicians AFTER they've been in office. The outcome of said vote will decide how much pension the person gets for the work done. If abysmal enough, I'm all for incarceration.
Even if the luminous efficacy improves a 60 watt incandescent to that of a 100 watt bulb that still puts it around 29-30 lumens per watt, about 30% of a good fluorescent or LED light source.
This is a nice improvement for an inherently inefficient and quite dated technology, but hardly but hardly "super-efficient" in the larger sense of overall luminous efficacy.
There's an app for that.
You screwed up your units, there. (watts)x(seconds) = joules.
You also forgot the negative on the exponent, but I'll forgive you for that...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
so... less than 60 watts?
Oh? Than what? Even after amortizing the capital and maintenance costs for the femtosec laser? 2x incandescent bulb efficiency puts it smack dab not as efficient as CFLs, and definitely not as efficient as LED lighting. Loses on lumens/$ to CFLs, as well. Jeez, it's amazing how many otherwise smart people either (a) don't appreciate the development distance between a cool lab demo and a commercial product, and/or (b) don't look over the hedge and see how much better some other tech is at meeting the need. Cool nanostructures and radiation enhancement effect, though - gotta give 'em that.
Let's do the math. From that fount of knowledge that is wikipedia, the US grid is about 4 thousand terawatts. That's 4*10^15 W.
So say we want over 4 times that, like 20*10^15 W to give 4 times the power of the US grid.
Power is energy divided by time. 1 femtosecond is 10^(-15) sec.
Let energy in joules be E, power in watts be P and time in seconds be T, then
E = P*T
So the energy of power 20*10^15 W times times time 10^(-15) is just 20 Joules.
Say it takes 1 sec to pump the laser, that's an average power of 20W. Of course the laser pumping
isn't 100% efficient, and 1 sec might not be the exact right time, it's still feasible. It's only the equivalent
energy of having the light bulb lit for a few seconds.
Yoghurt
So does this mean every evil genius lair is now only complete with sharks with freekin' light bulbs on their heads?
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Because wattage is a unit of power, not energy.
This laser doesn't use very much energy, even though it produces a focuses a huge amount of power on a small area.
So, by only using as much power as the entire grid of North America, we can make a "less than 60 watt" bulb as bright as a 100 watt bulb? Perhaps it operates more efficiently, but it doesn't sound like it is so efficient to produce. Unless I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting the verbiage from the summary.
What the summary fails to convey accurately is that femtosecond lasers while often delivering a paltry average power of a few (hundred) milliwats, have the mentioned immense bursts of power for almost unimaginably short periods of time with unmentioned comparatively long periods of quiescence. Peak illumination levels that approach or exceed levels at the surface of the sun are not unheard of; the filaments in question are certainly undergoing microscopic explosive plasma ablation. But, remember, such laser pulses last a very, very, very brief period of time and there's no laser illumination to speak of between these pulses, so that the average power is reasonably low.
Think of it this way: take a 5 mW continuous laser, like your favorite laser pointer. Turn it on for 1 second. Now imagine taking the gazillion photons that were emitted during that entire second and emitting them all in 1 femtosecond (remember, milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-, femto-). You still have 5 mW-seconds worth of photons, but the peak photon flux will be a thousand times a thousand times a thousand times a thousand times a thousand times brighter (that's 10^15 X brighter). That's more-or-less what femtosecond lasers do.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
You mean like they mandated emission standards instead of requiring every car to be built with a catalytic converter? Who would be silly enough to pay for lobbying for a law that doesn't favor their own industry while penalizing their competitors?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Well, they never actually say how *much* energy is used, specifically, to calculate the energy used, *but* I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that since the laser pulse only lasts a femtosecond (they do say that, specifically), it's not really using that much energy. Femto prefix indicates 1*10^-15, or 1 divided by a number which is 1 with 15 zeroes after it. That's an incredibly small amount of time. So, even if the power used is rated in Gigawatts, or even thousands of Gigawatts, remembering that Watts = Joules per second, the actual Joules of energy used is likely to be very small, because of the much-less-than-1-second time it runs.
It's like thinking in terms of, if I'm traveling at a speed of 1 million miles per hour, for one femtosecond, how far have I moved? Answer: 0.0000000176 inches.
If my light bulb doesn't shine like a 60watt bulb and require the energy of a 100watt bulb, then I want nothing to do with it! God Bless America!
Scratch that. I screwed up the units.
It comes out 104400 Joules or 29 Watt Hours.
Energy and Power are not the same. Specifically, Power is Energy divided by Time. W = E/t
Based on just the US, which for the sake of half-arsed napkin engineering on /. I will double to get total energy usage for North America in 2005, we're talking about 58000 TWh / 8760 h = 6.621 TW average power output.
Thus the laser pulse itself uses 6.621E12 W * 1E-12 J = 6.621 J.
The "efficient" lightbulb saves 40W. 6.621 J / 40 W = 0.165 s.
So it takes less than a second to recover the energy used by the laser. I'm sure the laser system itself uses more power than what is just in the beam, but the point is, ridiculous amounts of power in ridiculously short amounts of time results in quite rational and manageable power levels.
The enemies of Democracy are
The first sentence should have read: "Well, they never actually say how *much* power is used,. . ." (emphasis only to show the change).
Because you math is wrong? Don't worry, I failed college algebra the first time too.
I think you've got an error in your figures. The summary says that the laser produces as much power as the US grid. Your calculations use the electrical energy output of an entire year. To get it right, you would also need to divide out, not by one femtosecond, but by the number of femtoseconds in a year, which would yield the US energy usage per fs.
Alternately, use the (average) power output of US grid, which would be 29000 TWh / number of seconds in a year. It comes to about 920 GW (approx 10^12 W). Then multiply by one femtosecond (10^-15 sec) to get the energy embodied in one of these pulses, which is about 1 mJ if I did my calcs correctly. Say the filament requires millions of pulses to get this new level of efficiency, you are only looking at hundreds or thousands of extra joules added to the manufacturing, which is far less than the bulb will use over its lifetime.
How many lightbulbs would they need to convert from 100W to 60W usage (over time) to equal the energy cost of 1 femto second laser blast that "unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America"?
one point twenty-one ji-ga-wahts??
FYI the best Flourcent bulb is 100 lm/Watt (CFL is 60-72) while the best white LED is 131 lm/Watt (over 150 lm/Watt for some other colors.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Energy_efficiency
so while currently most CFL beat most LED in efficiency, inherently it looks like LED has a better future. Especially with LED lights having a longer (best case) lifetime, and being instant on to full power, and no high voltages present.
The LED at home being a new trend, with in-efficient transformers, and cheap production units likely causing damage to their reputation. Much like Fluorescent is still trying to get over the poor initial products reputation (with odd colors, poor life, and several minutes of power up, with constantly buzzing transformers, and odd harmonics with monitors, video cameras, and TV's.)
As another poster pointed out, although the power is a lot, the energy is very little. The power is around 500GW. That's 5e11W, or J/s. One femtosecond is 1e-15s. Multiply these together and you get 5e-4J, or 0.0005J. At a 40W saving, it takes you 12.5 microseconds to recoup the energy. Generally, I expect bulbs to last longer than that, but maybe your usage patterns are different.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I hope these guys are correct, but there are a few things to look into:
* A small segment of blasted filament would look brighter if the laser simply thinned out the filament or raised its resistance.
Tungsten has a strong negative temperature coefficient of resistance so the total power draw might not change much. I hope
they were not misled in this way.
* Light bulb filaments are very tightly curled so a significant part of the light intersects nearby loops of the filament. A better, blacker emissive surface will also be a much better absorber, making the whole thing a wash.
Conservation is a red herring: population growth will outstrip any resulting savings. Instead, we should focus on generating energy sustainably. We can do that today with a combination of wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear power.
Conservation almost always reduces our quality of life. Why should we do that when we have the technology to not only save the environment, but improve our lives as well? We should be encouraging people to use more energy when that power makes life easier. By all rights, electricity should be cheap and plentiful.
I can't help but wonder whether conservation advocates feel guilt over civilization itself. I certainly don't. There's no shame in using technology to make our lives better.
Dunno if this is gonna happen yet, or not, but I've seen articles about the use of oLed sheets as light sources - instead of being a 'bulb' in the usual sense, think more like those ceiling mounted fluorescent light fixtures with diffusers so common in schools, office buildings, and retail. Or, think of a computer monitor that is all white (although, the light need not be pure white - could be offwhite colors - could even change the color when you want, maybe), but brighter. They also say that OLEDs will become thin and flexible, so you could take your OLED 'film' and wrap it around a curved surface or something.
So, you could have lighting that looks like a sort of 'standard' table-lamp with a lampshade - except the 'lampshade' is actually the OLED 'film', giving off light directly into the room, with no bulb inside the lampshade.
That's still a number of years into the future, if it ever happens. OLEDs have to become many times cheaper than they are now before that'll happen.
LOW EFFICIENCY incandescent bulbs are banned. IIRC, I believe that HIGH-EFFICIENCY bulbs are OK.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So does the energy saved give a positive balance to that used in creating this new filament?
And aren't most filaments larger/longer than a needle point?
Maybe I'm not yet ready to get too excited about this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Since most power plants in the US (and many other countries too) burn coal, which contains mercury, these slightly-more-efficient incandescent lights will most likely end up dumping more mercury straight into the atmosphere
Thought the whole argument for electric cars was that it's easier to control pollution at a single source than hundreds of thousands of sources...
So which is it, are electric cars really a bane to the environment or are CFL's that WILL get thrown out with the trash by countless people?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I smell an array of transport enhancers... or, this is a diabolical plot to turn homes into super collectors... But, i am awaiting the cavalier responses such as, "I can assure you; nothing can go wro....*(&#$"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
How many lightbulbs would they need to convert from 100W to 60W usage (over time) to equal the energy cost of 1 femto second laser blast
Dunno, but my guess is that for each lightbulb, it will take at least 3 Slashdotters to screw it in. One to hold the ladder, one to screw it in, and one to explain the significance of a femtosecond.
That's not including the dozen or so other Slashdotters who will want to attend and debate the relative merits of CFLs and LEDs, another dozen who insist they're wrong, a few older Slashdotters who moan about the old lightbulb working just fine, and one guy standing in a corner mumbling something about a government conspiracy while rolling out tinfoil to fashion a head covering.
The laser burst lasts only a few quadrillionths of a second.
Ah, thanks, I was wondering how long a femtosecond laser pulse lasts for.
sic transit gloria mundi
Can I use ill-tempered mutant Chilean sea bass instead?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Watts is a measurement of joules per second, so if you multiple power by time (as in applying 4x10^15 Watts for 10^-15 seconds) you get 4 joules.
"Guo's laser unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America... "
so to make a 100Watt lamp, you need a Gigawatt laser?
You're missing a whole bunch. At some point, I've got to put up a reference chart on a website somewhere.
The media system of measurement includes the following units and more:
Libraries of Congress (data)
Volkswagen Beetles (length or height, when laid end-to-end or stacked)
Volkswagen Beetles (volume, for large holes or containers)
Volkswagen Beetles filled with magentic tapes (data throughput)
football fields (area)
swimming pools (volume)
EPU-NAEG (entire power output, north american energy grid -- power)
EPC-SH (Entire power consumption, single home)
EPC-USH (Entire power consumption, all United States homes)
Empire State Buildings (height)
Mississippi Rivers (flow rate)
point of a pin|needle (area)
I'm sure there are many, many more... I've misplaced the list I was compiling.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Aw, crap. That one was missed by the spellchecker. Since when was magentic a word? Is that the adjectival form of magenta? Is fuschial a word?
At any rate, I didn't mean a VW Beetle full of purplish tapes. I meant magnetic tapes. Although now my mental image of data throughput is a lot prettier.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Whenever talking about electricity in this magnitude, I always want the calculations done in "number of DeLoreans sent backward in time". From an earlier post, I'm estimating that:
1 entire power output of the north american energy grid = 410 DeLoreans sent backward in time
and thought we had a new unit of measure :P
Me: Ready to go honey?
Her: Yes, just a second...
(20 min pause until we actually leave)
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
He did say of a second, and not seconds, so I guess he was right on that one, pedantry excused ;)
The rest goes to feed the sharks.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Lasers are the only acceptable solution to any problem like this.
Or to put it in more comparable units, it will only take a fraction of a second for this bulb to save the amount energy used by the laser when compared to a standard bulb:
4 watt*seconds / (100watt - 60watt) = 1/10 second
The local problem with CFL's (they contain a trace of mercury) is outbalanced by the central problem of coal-burning releasing even more mercury.
And I just said a point source makes it easy to capture pollutants, therefore that simply is not the case. It should be easy to scrub out mercury from coal plant emissions to be virtually none, meanwhile CFL's will be in landfills all over...
Even if more mercury were going out of a plant it would all be local to a region around the plant instead of spread to dumps all over the place, making the actual impact of coal burnt at a power plant far less even if the amount were a trillion times higher.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Guo's laser unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America onto a spot the size of a needle point."
Hmmm... that just reads funny. Will the cost of the power equivalent of the entire North American grid for a femto-second be built into the cost of the light bulb? That sounds expensive.
I'm sure I'm overlooking something. I usually do.
If they ban incandescents, what will become of Easy Bake Ovens? Oh the humanity! When will ever learn?
However, power plants, even burning coal, are far preferable to burning gasoline in millions of tiny, mobile, poorly-maintained engines.
And the reason for that is emissions.
Similarly, I am talking eventual mercury emissions into the environment either from CFL, or a power plant...
In fact if you think about it you still have the mercury issue from power plants using CFL because they still use power. If you don't use CFL, the only source of mercury emissions is the power plant so you have more incentive to clean it up and more ability to do so.
Even if the "emission" phase from a light bulb only happens when it's disposed of, it's still mercury going into a landfill. Just because it's less frequent does not mean it's not harmful in aggregate.
I'm not against alternative lighting, I think LED lighting is great and will eventually win out. But CFL's are not a good solution to alternative lighting - they don't really get you that much benefit (not even power savings) and have hidden tradeoffs people are apparently willing to overlook even if in the end they are more harmful to the environment as a result. They are a typical "feel good" solution that just makes you feel better without actually helping.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Too late. Incandescent light bulbs are illegal soon. Who needs technology when we have laws?
Well it is sure nice to hear we could make the old light bulb more efficient. Quite a few people agree that the new "efficient" lighting sold in stores may cause a serious problem and that we *may* be shooting ourselves in the foot. Problem would be that newer "efficient" lighting may cost more to produce energy wise and that each unit contains among others mercury which should not get disposed of in the garbage bin.
Not sure if the alternative in the FA in viable although ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The thing I hate most about CFL bulbs is the radio interference they create. I get enough RFI in my area from dimmers, touch lamps, CFL lamps, switching mode battery chargers, plasma TV's, computers, monitors, yard lights and the controllers in LED lamps! Any method to perpetuating good old incandescent lamps is welcome news to me. If you could see the RF pollution that radiates off consumer electronic devices (not to mention the power grid) you would SHIT your pants!
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Hold on a sec. They're...
I'm having a little trouble with imagining how it could be efficient to do that for every lightbulb sold.
Fewer, not less.
HTH. HAND.
Over the life of the bulb will it conserve enough energy to make up for the energy wasted by the uber-laser to create the filament?
This new development may not, at present, result in net gain.
Kill-a-watt baby!
I remember reading somewhere that incandescent bulbs are made somewhere in America -- Tennessee? Whereas the great majority of CFLs come from China. If incandescent bulbs can be made significantly more efficient, and they're made locally, it sounds like a win-win to me.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
a longer description of Power Factor:
http://www.ee.bgu.ac.il/~instlab/Experiments/05_FlurLamp/PowerFactor1.pdf
This is a fantastically obscure process, and I am wondering if I am the only one who thought: alien technology?
The reason tungsten filaments have any appreciable lifetime at all, instead of just vaporizing themselves like carbon or nickel or any of the other 5,997 materials eventually rejected, is that tungsten filaments self-repair any imperfections.
If a pit forms in the filament surface, the convexities start to ablate into a vapor, and the concavities start to collect atoms from the vapor. The crater becomes a depression, then a dip, then disappears.
In other materials the concentration of electric current and resultant heating around the defect would cause the defect to get larger, but, since tungsten collects atoms much faster as it gets hotter, it causes the defect to get smaller quicker.
in the meantime the increased heat at that spot would produce more photons.
But it's temporary. It only lasts as long as the defect remains unrepaired.
So. Making the filament lumpy deliberately will make it brighter, but that will start the self-repair process, which won't take long to complete. Meaning you spent a very expensive process step to create a "more efficient" light bulb that over a few minutes or hours becomes just another light bulb.
I personally cannot stand CFLs.
For some reason I have balance issues in a room lit with CFLs. Walking around in those big-box stores lit with massive clusters of fluorescent lights I get dizzy. I have to get what I need and leave as quickly as possible
While I am probably an exception, I cannot agree that these horrible lights should be mandated. If these Laser-Incandescent bulbs are available: I will buy them
Do they have a medical exception in that bill?
If the figures in TFA are correct, these slightly more efficient incandescents are about half as efficient as a CFL.
The operative word in that sentence is "these".
- I've seen reports that incandescent filaments with other nanostructures on their surfaces can beat or tie with CFLs.
- These are only about half the improvement needed to match CFLs. But the modification can be easily applied by zapping an ALREADY CONSTRUCTED bulb, creating a very randomized nanostructure.
And this group is still experimenting - getting more structure to the tweak, adjusting color balance, polarization...
Any bets on whether they (or another group) gets near to or beats CFL efficiency within the next year or so?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Another tweak that works is to make the bulb spherical and give it a coating that reflects infrared while passing visible light. The reflected infrared photons are reabsorbed by the filament and the energy gets another chance to be emitted as a visible photon. This also makes a big improvement.
Combining the two might be even better.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Right now, a typical 100 watt incandescent light bulb lasts, oh, 500-1000 hours, costs about 25c and uses, of course, 100 watts.
I am currently using a 23 watt compact fluorescent light bulb, which produces the same amount of light, and because of economies of scale has gotten down to 12 times the price of an incandescent, about $3.75 and supposedly will last as much as 10,000 hours. On total cost if you include electricity, a CF is going to be less expensive long term.
But the best deal so far, if the numbers are correct, is the LED light bulb, which unfortunately is about 8 times as expensive as a compact fluorescent at about $8.00, but the electricity numbers are shocking (pun unintentional). The $8 bulb will presumably run about as long as a CF, and produce about the equivalent of 100 watts of light, and do so on ONE WATT. If the LED can produce the same lumens for 1% of the electrical cost and 10 times the operating life, it would be hands down the best bargain in net total costs even though it's basically about 64 times as expensive for the bulb as the Incandescent. Presuming a cost of 6c per KWH, an incandescent will burn $6 worth of electricity at 100 hours, while the CF would have burned $2 and the LED would have burned 6c. For the expected lifetimes, that is, 10 Incandescent bulbs or 1 CF or LED, the costs would be as follows.
LED, $8 for bulb, 60c worth of electricity, $8.60
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
A lightbulb works because the filiment gets really hot and glows with blackbody radiation. All of the electric power that goes into the bulb is radiated. So in some sense, the incandecent bulb is already 100% effecient. the only problem is that most of the radiated energy is at infrared frequencies and doesn't do anything to light the room for human eyes. If you increase the emmisivity of the filiment to 100%, it is not obvious that you increase the effeciency of the bulb one iota. In fact, I would guess that the effeciency of the bulb goes down, since the filiment temperature will go down (since you radiate more power at a given temperature) and more of the radiation will be in the IR. Now, if he can change the surface of the filiment so the emmisivity is very high in the visable but very low in the IR, then and only then will he be onto something. -Rob (and yes, I am in fact a physicist)
This appears only to show usage, not how "dirty" the power is. Or am I missing something?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
You mean... OMG that's exactly what they have done. The ban is a misunderstanding. What they did is they banned low efficiency bulbs except in certain situations (like chandelier bulbs w/e). Good to know you and the government agree.
...Much like Fluorescent is still trying to get over the poor initial products reputation (with odd colors, poor life, and several minutes of power up, with constantly buzzing transformers, and odd harmonics with monitors, video cameras, and TV's.)
I am glad I am not the only person who has noticed that the reputation of fluorescent bulbs is due to poor initial products, and these problems are not found the products that are currently being sold.
Every time CFLs come up on slashdot, I read comments like, "the colours are awful", "they take minutes to warm up", "they flicker".
Thats sort of like saying "I used a computer 20 years ago, and it was terrible, much too slow to be used for multimedia applications."
products do improve...
-I only code in BASIC.-
** Mod parent up: Funny, Informative, LMFAO **
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Me and Steve Jobs shove iPhones up each other's asses for fun.
Steve Jobs and I.
Fnord.
Not ideally suited, but you won't find anything better for anywhere close to $25. If you plug it in when you think the power is dirty, it makes all the measurements. No logging and no automatic determination of AC quality thought. You have to do the watching and judging on your own
"Also check the quality of your power by monitoring Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor."
http://www.p3international.com/products/special/P4400/P4400-CE.html
At least we're not longer in a country run by Dick, Bush, and Colon.
(apologies to Kurt Vonegut Jr.)
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
FTA: "Guo's laser unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America"
Doesn't sound like much of a power saver to me.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
I assume this works by increasing the surface area of the filament. This will also increase the rate of evaporation of the tungsten which will shorten the bulb's life. Seems pretty impractical to me to do this on the entire surface of the filament at a reasonible cost anyway.
Why not set an efficiency factor on a bulb
That's exactly what they did do.
From section 212 of the CLEAN Energy Act of 2007, table "INCANDESCENT REFLECTOR LAMPS":
Wattage Required efficiency (%)
40-50 10.5
51-66 11.0
67-85 12.5
86-115 14.0
116-155 14.5
156-205 15.0
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Isn't a femtosecond thus technically a standard unit?
I'm going to need to see the details and conversion factors for how you converted "the amount of electricity used by a 60 watt bulb" to watts.
In Australia they use Sydney harbours as a measure of volume.(Usually relating to water)
In reading the article, they noticed that when they hit a spot on the filimant, it burned brighter and jumped to all kinds of conclusions.. Something is missing.. Science.
In a series circuit, the high resistance spot will always run hotter. Is the spot on the filimant an effecient radiator, or simply a high resistance spot because the condutor has been blasted into a high resistance structure.
Remember, this is a spot on the filimant that was noticed burning brighter and not an entire filimant. Color temprature measurements of the spot were NOT taken. Is the spot more effecient, or just hotter creating a early failure of the bulb.
The article has jumped to way too many conclusions without enough tesing to see if it is indeed effeient or just a high resistance hot spot.
Wake me up when they have the color temprature of the hot spot compared to the rest of the filimant.
The truth shall set you free!
Incandescents waste energy as heat, but what about winter when this heat isn't wasted but is actually useful? When it's warm, yeah, it's an undesired by product, but during the winter they help you heat your home.
let me get this straight (no, I didnt RTFA):
We blast a filament with the energy of the ENTIRE grid for a microsecond. we then "save" energy?
Isnt that kinda like spending an extra $20 to buy a coupon to save 5$ on a product? How is that more efficient?
I can appear to be more efficient as a manager by making my underlings work longer hours behind the scenes. That still doesnt make it more efficient in reality (just in perception). Sure, you saw me do something really fast and efficient, but that doesnt mean that the entire energy used to complete the project is actually less due to hidden "costs".
This reminds me of hydrogen vehicles. "but hydrogen burns so efficiently! Its the energy of the future because it is so efficient!!!!" Yet everyone forgets that it costs so freakin much to CREATE (refine) hydrogen that the final output of hydrogen energy can actually be a NEGATIVE result (e.g. 5 units of coal energy to create/refine enough hydrogen to create 4 units of work).
"the road to hell is paved with good intentions" /yes, I know thats not an accurate quote but I am using it anyway.
Steve Jobs and /.?
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
I see no mention in the article on how long the resulting bulbs would last.
The process might make the bulb brighter but shorten the lifespan.
The reason this works is that the surface is modified at the nanoscale to suppress emissions in the infrared spectrum where most of the energy of an incandescent light bulb is wasted. Guess what? This has already been done nearly 20 years ago.
U.S. Patent 5,123,868 describes a filament with nanoscale tuned resonant cavities that suppress the emission of infrared. No fancy femtosecond lasers - it was manufactured using centuries-old metalworking techniques of repeatedly drawing wires to make them thinner, followed by acid etching. It works. It improves the efficiency about twofold. Unfortunately, nanostructures can't withstand these high temperatures very long, even when made of tungsten. They deteriorate in less than 100 hours and efficiency drops to that of a conventional bulb. I'm pretty sure happens here, too.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Then he forgot the "th".
2 of an orange wouldn't really make complete sense, but I wouldn't assume it meant 1/2 an orange.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Controversy has erupted over incandescent light bulbs being phased out to be replaced with horrible expensive yellow things that look like robot marital aids.
The switch to compact fluorescent lamps is expected to save households two-thirds of their monthly income, singlehandedly save the world from climate change and bring about world peace, harmony and a top 10 chart not filled with rubbish.
However, many people find the low-energy bulbs ugly, slow to warm up and much more expensive, and the harsher light they give off akin to that of a police cell or McDonald's. Their rapid flicker contains coded messages designed to hypnotise independent-minded citizens and turn them into gibberish-spouting socialist cultists. The bulbs are made entirely of mercury, polonium and ebola. Scientists have proven that Hitler used low-energy bulbs for illumination when writing Mein Kampf, and paedophiles prefer internet images of dear innocent children taken under their unforgiving glare.
The Daily Mail has come out strongly against the compact fluorescents. "British cowed by tin pot marxists maddest flights from reality political class bizarre gesture Bliar take away liberty march on Westminster revolt against Europe IF YOU LIKE IT SO MUCH WHY DON'T YOU LIVE THERE." To this end, the paper is giving away five thousand incandescent bulbs free!!! when you spend a pound calling an 0900 number.
"We can't be having this com-pack fluoro Euro rubbish," said Brenda Busybody, 77 (IQ) of East Cheam. "They just don't have the same warm glow to them. It's so cold this week! We need more gas lamps and burning torches, they go well with the pitchforks."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Incandescent bulbs? We already have fluorescent! Lets concentrate on making LED brighter and more efficient.
Honestly SEWilco, I do need incandescent tho. I produce heat with them to bend wood on a jig for guitars.
When incandescents are illegal, only outlaws will be luthiers.
I guess I will have to stock up a few years supply.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
It sounds to me like they use up the entire potential energy savings of the device in the process of manufacturing it.
I'm finally getting around to responding to this because Slashdot finally got around to fixing their RSS feed.
I can't remember the last time I saw one of those light bulb. Do people still use them?
Max.
"To get a grasp of that kind of speed, consider that a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 32 million years. During its brief burst, Guo's laser unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America onto a spot the size of a needle point."
Sure, but how many "Library-of-Congresses is that?
Max.
Max.
I follow you, all except for the part where you randomly multiply by 4. Are you assuming that there are 4 lasers running simultaneously? I guess then the machine could make 4 bulbs at once.
I'm also wondering how you multiplied 4 x 4*10^15 and got 20*10^15.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Will this even work for realistic bulb lifetimes if the suface is prone to sputtering? If its just a surface treatment, then any blemish will ruin the nano structures and thus revert the filiment back to standard operation.
I'll sell you some special ones with gold-plated contacts that provide a much warmer, more "analog" light experience. All the visiophiles swear by them.
You calculated 29,000 TWh / femtosecond. Which is an impressive figure, but not at all correct. That would be like focusing the entire energy use of the US in 2005 into a 1-femtosecond laser pulse. This obviously cannot be the case (heck, you'd have to steal the entire power output of the US for a year just to charge the darn thing).
Actually, it's more like this.
29,000 terawatt hours = 1.044*10^20 joules
That is how much energy was used in 2005. We only want to know how much was used in 1 femtosecond.
(1.044*10^20 joules) * (1 femtosecond / 1 year) = 0.00330830703 joules
That is how much energy would be needed to power the laser for 1 femtosecond. (Assuming the 2005 figure is valid, and disregarding the fact that it's just the US and TFA actually specified the entire North American power grid.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
And here I am programmed to turn off lights when I leave the room. This being the case, I am more of an environmentalist for turning off my incandescent lights than I would be converting my whole house to CFL. With the exception of my living room, I am wasting money buying the CFLs. And they will be banned in the name of environmentalism.
Yes, because it's still better, even for you, doing what you already do.
Say you replace every light with CFLs, and continue to turn off the lights in most rooms after only a short period of time. These lights will last merely as long as incandescents, and use 1/4th the power while doing so. Since you're an environmentalist and recycle, the mercury in the bulbs is a non-issue and all that saved power is pure win.
You could be right that it would cost more, depending on energy costs at your location in space/time/marketing* the power savings won't offset the extra cost of the CFLs. So it's not necessarily an economic win, but it is an environmental win. Is it worth spending a little extra money to be environmentally friendly? Is it worth having the government mandate this extra cost? They've already done it for vehicle emissions, with measurable benefits to our environment.
* Of course the 5th dimension is market segmentation, aka the Marketing Dimension.
The enemies of Democracy are
Would that be the same as "consuming less than 60 watt"?
Doesn't the power required to operate a "super-powerful" laser, somewhat mitigate the power "savings" you might resultingly implement on the lightbulb?
Agreed. Without making a seperate circuit to handle lamp power similar to how a laptop backlight works I won't be able to use them. I have a couple inverters from laptops but I've not tried to use the on/off or dimmer circuits on them as I've not found datasheets and haven't had the time to analyze the circuit.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
My 22W CFLs are considered 100W incandescent-equivalent, and good white LED lamps designed for regular light sockets are slightly better. And LEDs are being improved.
If I understand the press release correctly, 60 watts in for the equivalent of 100W incandescent out is the theoretical maximum for this technology.
Making this a non-starter for general illumination needs, particularly as US Federal law says that the incandescent is going to become unavailable for general lighting in any case.
However, the filterless pure color and polarized light possibilities suggest this device has a great future in specialized industrial, scientific, and even theatrical lighting uses.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Those would be flip sides of the same coin, in a sense.
"consuming less electricity than a 60-watt bulb" refers to the energy use.
"consuming less than 60 watts" refers to the power demand.
If we're talking about a set interval of time (say, an hour), then power and energy are linearly related. However, they're not the same thing. They're like velocity and distance: in a set unit of time, the faster car will go farther, but "car A is faster" and "car A went farther" are not the same statement (although either one implies the other because of the distance = rate * time relationship).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.