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Cause of LED Efficiency Droop Finally Revealed

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in collaboration with colleagues at the École Polytechnique in France, have been able to prove the theory behind LED 'droop.' LED droop is the term for how LEDs emit less light when the amount of current being pushed through them goes above a certain level. 'The cost per lumen of LEDs has held the technology back as a viable replacement for incandescent bulbs for all-purpose commercial and residential lighting.' Now that we understand what causes this, we should start to see research go into technology to circumvent LED Droop. 'LEDs have enormous potential for providing long-lived high quality efficient sources of lighting for residential and commercial applications. The U.S. Department of Energy recently estimated that the widespread replacement of incandescent and fluorescent lights by LEDs in the U.S. could save electricity equal to the total output of fifty 1 GW power plants.'" A pre-print of the team's paper is available at the arXiv.

47 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. multiply by Randle_Revar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >the total output of fifty 1 GW power plants

    Soooo... 50 GW?

    1. Re:multiply by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Witch!

      Don't you come in here and git all European-like and start a-quotin' your Systeme Internationale at me. I likes my units in New Imperial, and thats how's they're gonna stay if I done have anything to done say abouts it.

    2. Re: multiply by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Great Scott!!! 50 Jiggawatts!?!

    3. Re:multiply by conorpeterson · · Score: 5, Funny

      >the total output of fifty 1 GW power plants

      Soooo... 50 GW?

      Or by my own calculation, 41.32 lightning bolts! Great Scott!

    4. Re:multiply by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      50 1GW plants do not equal 50GW as the output is not continuously at their maximum. It also doesn't equal one 50GW plant in the fact that one central plant would need a lot of infrastructure to distribute the power around the whole country. Since the economy would be very spread and not localized, it means 50 1GW plants distributed across the network.

    5. Re:multiply by chrismcb · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, they say that like everyone knows what a "1 GW power plant" is... Is that a typical plant? Is it a small one? Is that the one you might see that powers a university, or one that powers a big city? Or is that about the size of the Manitoba Hydro Limestone hydroelectric generating station?
      Ohh look Mr. Wiki claims that 55 GW is about the peak daily consumption of Great Britain in 2008. Wouldn't that have been more meaningful to say?

    6. Re:multiply by NemoinSpace · · Score: 4, Funny

      In much the same way that 50 inane AC responses does equal the coherency of the parent.
      Invariably, like a game of "telephone", the subject switches to cars. -reading at -1 is the only true freedom. Moderation is an oxymoron.

    7. Re:multiply by TempestRose · · Score: 2

      Card Revoked.
      Back to the future? Buehler?

    8. Re:multiply by mark-t · · Score: 2

      I get the BTF reference. My point was only that you wouldn't need 50 lightning bolts to get 50GW, since even a single lightning bolt has on the order of a terawatt or more of power (so you could get 1.21GW from a single lightning bolt as well).

    9. Re:multiply by camperdave · · Score: 2

      So what you're saying is that a lightning bolt that struck, say, a clock tower, would have enough energy to fuse the clock and still have enough power to drive a circuit needing a smidge over 1200 MegaWatts - if it were timed right.

      --
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    10. Re:multiply by dknight · · Score: 2

      while I mostly agree with you, I couldnt tell you how many kWh of electricity my home consumed last month. I could tell you what I paid for it, but no idea the actual consumption numbers - the cost is what is relevant to me, so I never feel any particular need to know the kWh. I'm sure plenty of other folks are the same way.

    11. Re:multiply by rpresser · · Score: 4, Funny

      How about enormous aboveground supercapacitors? We could call it .. cloud storage.

    12. Re:multiply by Kizul+Emeraldfire · · Score: 2

      Hey, I'm just saying that you can get a whole lot more than 1.21gw out of a single lightning bolt.

      Okay, maybe I'm humor impaired. Sorry. I took the original comment as meaning that the poster figured that if BTF was any indication, 1.21gw was about all the power you could usefully get out of a lightning bolt. This doesn't consider the possibility that the bolt of lightning in BTF actually had far more kick than that, the car only needing 1.21gw of it.

      Call me morbidly curious, but what sort of worse things could happen?

      I must admit, I'm curious: assuming that the average lightning bolt contained, say, ten terawatts of energy -- and, just to be generous, assuming that the lightning bolt in Back to the Future contained only a mere five to seven-and-a-half terawatts — wouldn't the time circuits've been blown up due to the immense power surge?

      Of course, realistically-speaking: even if you calculated everything absolutely correctly down to a thousandth (or millionth, even) of a second, the probability of managing to time the connection of the hook to the wire just as the lightning bolt struck the clock tower is phenomenally slim. Marty was very lucky to've managed to pull it off, but if he had been just a fraction of a second too early, the hook would've ended up getting pulled out of the time circuits before they'd gotten enough juice, and Marty would've ended up having to wait around in 1955 while Doc formulated a new plan; and if he'd been just a fraction of a second too late, it seems to me unlikely that there would be enough power left on/in the wire for the time circuits to activate upon the hook's connection with it.

      This is additionally assuming that not only do the time circuits activate instantaneously with the introduction of the lightning bolt's energy, but that the time jump also occurs at the exact same time, and that the time jump consumes enough of the lightning bolt's energy quickly enough that the time circuits somehow don't overload before they are, via the time jump, abruptly disconnected from the conductor (the hook and wire).

      I may be completely off-base, however. I have no idea; I'm not Randall Monroe. I don't think I know quite all of the intricacies of this stuff, either. I do apologize for this effectively-off-the-topic-of-the-article comment, though; this is just something that's been bugging me for a while.

  2. But i like to dim my lights by uberbrainchild · · Score: 2

    Over here in sweden it's hard to find a good old light bulb that will dim. But I guess I can live with the non dimming led bulbs for now

    --
    Anveto
    1. Re:But i like to dim my lights by AK+Marc · · Score: 2

      I know. I bought a bunch of them from different stores/makers. They all flicker when powered in their listed range (0-12W dimmable DC). But the box clearly states "dimmable".

    2. Re:But i like to dim my lights by Osgeld · · Score: 2

      the main problem with household LED lighting is they are made as stupid cheap as possible. I popped one apart and it was an LED, slug of god knows what metal and a big ass power resistor, nothing else

      so you are using the diode part to block the negative ac waveform, already your LED is on only "50%" of the time, so directly out of the box its flickering at 30Hz, mess with that with a dimmer and it gets worse.

    3. Re: But i like to dim my lights by Khyber · · Score: 2

      Hell I went ahead and recorded the video. There you go, prepare to be proven wrong.

      My only flaw in this video was not using a larger potentiometer with a helical structure for more fine-grained current control, and using 200K Ohm instead of at least 500K ohm potentiometer. But I just snatched a pot right off a busted aquarium air pump just to show you that you're wrong.

      --
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  3. The other reason for LED 'droop' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yo, genius, you misread the resistor markings when you wired up your Arduino circuit.

  4. Answer not in summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's because of Auger recombination. Basically, you stick in too many electrons, and they all mill around talking with each other instead of getting any work done. This is also known as the 'Water Cooler Effect'.

    1. Re:Answer not in summary by N+Monkey · · Score: 5, Funny

      So, you're saying that instead of an electron falling into a hole causing a photon to be given off, the electrons are all huddled together elsewhere talking about the last episode of Big Bang Theory?

      No. They'd be discussing "Quantum Leap"

  5. Re:Darn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Of course we would. We all have time machines.

  6. Re:Looking forward to replacing a bulb... never by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is why LEDs are already used in traffic lights. If you look at the cost of sending out a crew, putting up cones, flagging traffic around the workers, etc., the cost of replacing a bulb can run into kilobucks. Even if the bulb itself is more expensive, it is far more cost effective to use LED traffic lights to avoid the traffic problems, labor costs, and safety problems of burnt out incandescents.

  7. Re:BlaBla .. Blub!! - GaN excitation AUGER process by Randle_Revar · · Score: 2

    It links to an .edu, ieee, and arxiv. It is not an advertisement, troll

  8. DOE Energy Frontier Research Center by james.sneed.aglife.c · · Score: 2

    Leave to our government to have a Department of Energy Energy Frontier Research Center. This just in from the Department of Redundancy Department we can reduce half the E from the DOE EFRC using LED's to become LEED certified says the CEEM.

  9. Try the little blue ones by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    The little blue LEDs help me when I start to droop. Call your doctor if you don't stop drooping for more than two hours.

  10. Re:Looking forward to replacing a bulb... never by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Informative

    You don't even need a resistor, just a smarter hood.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  11. Re:Looking forward to replacing a bulb... never by dbIII · · Score: 2

    So, blaming the LED for the bad design of the cover? Didn't think too much before posting did you?

  12. Since my comment is in the other less-popular post by Khyber · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Pay very close attention to LEDs. Now that we've identified the root cause of one of our biggest problems, in a few years, we'll find ways to work around those problems and extend the lifespan of an LED (and output at higher drive currents) with a minimal loss of light.

    This is EXCITING news, as the uses for this across the entire electronics industry are MASSIVE. Higher-efficiency, longer-lasting LEDs means better optical devices and such, as this same tech can be applied down into solid-state laser diodes.

    I'm literally about to piss myself from this news. The sheer implications of this knowledge are astounding.

    I hope thermal pad and PCB makers are paying attention and prepare, because very soon we'll be pushing a LOT more power through these tiny LEDs, and we'll need the local cooling to compensate.

    I only wonder just how far they can defeat or mitigate this effect, and how. Thicker well walls might be an idea, or perhaps a nano-wire-like growth pattern, like we've seen with the recent development of microwires on graphite sheets, can increase the surface area and reduce the available recombination area, thus forcing electron transport.

    Something to either attract, guide, or force more electrons across the gap seems to be what is needed.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  13. Another crap "summary" by oldhack · · Score: 2

    Basically, past a threshold current, it starts to emit electrons instead of more photons (look up "auger effect").

    Thanks again to "editors", illiterate both in English and science.

    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
  14. Re:Looking forward to replacing a bulb... never by Shark · · Score: 4, Funny

    You have to be a pretty bad driver to end up on top of a traffic light though.

    --
    Mind the frickin' laser...
  15. Re:Since my comment is in the other less-popular p by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm literally about to piss myself from this news.

    That's great, this is why I come here. What other site can you visit where people are more excited about a group of electrons than cute cats?

    I'll bet right now you'd rather experiment with electrons than with sex.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  16. Re:The Color...Ugh by Arkh89 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The white led are in fact blue LEDs with a phosphor layer which "shifts" the emission spectrum towards green and red. Thus, white LEDs looks bluer or "colder" (associated with ice). The bulbs can be considered as black bodies radiators and thus have their spectrum "coming from" the red part of the spectrum (in fact most of the energy is wasted in the IR as heat dissipation). Their color are more yellowish (centered on green, 550nm) just like the Sun and seems warmer (like a camp fire). Now you can combine few color LEDs to reproduce the the D65 illuminant (Black body at 6500K, like our Sun) by balancing the amount of current in them. Other trick : you reprogram your mind to follow "correctly" Wien's displacement law : blue color is for warmer black bodies compared to yellowish and reddish black bodies (thermal emission). To make sure of that : think of a metallic part you heat up, it will start as black (as in not-emitting) then go to red, then yellowish and then bluish (but you will see it white-blue at this point). So, white LEDs should appear "warmer" when considering true physics...

  17. Re:Since my comment is in the other less-popular p by Khyber · · Score: 2

    That 'ceramic' is still aluminum. Aluminum nitride and alumina mix, to be more precise

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  18. Re:but won't somebody think of the Mercury? by ThePeices · · Score: 3, Informative

    but won't somebody think of the Mercury? Or toxins, or radio waves, or autism that LEDs cause?

    What mercury? Ain't none in LED's.
    LED's don't emit radio waves. The power supply might ( but utterly harmless levels ), but not LED's
    LED's don't cause autism.

    LED's don't do anything, except emit light and get a bit warm.

    OP: Education. Get one.

  19. Cost Per Lumen? BS! by guttentag · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The cost per lumen of LEDs has held the technology back as a viable replacement for incandescent bulbs for all-purpose commercial and residential lighting.

    Really? CREE started distributing LED bulbs a month or two ago through Home Depot for less than $10 each. I own two of them.

    450 lumens for $9.97 is 0.0222 per lumen. It's rated to last 22.8 years. That's $0.0010 per lumen per year of use.

    Let's compare that to an "equivalent" (the cree is a 40-watt equivalent bulb) incandescent bulb. $8.77 for a pack of 6 is $1.46 per bulb.

    300 lumens for $1.46 is $0.0049 per lumen. But it's only rated to last 0.9 years. That's $0.0544 per lumen per year of use. It's more than 54 times more expensive than the CREE. That's before you look at the electricity you'll be saving (6 watts to get more light than you would out of a 40 watt incandescent).

    Home Depot is also selling CREE's 60-watt equivalent:

    800 lumens for $12.97 is 0.0162 per lumen.It's rated to last 22.8 years. That's $0.0007 per lumen per year of use. The incandescent is 77 times more expensive.

    As much as I love CREE LEDs in general, I prefer Philips 10.5-watt bulb. The bulb itself it more aesthetically pleasing (in my opinion) and it diffuses the light better (the CREE focuses all the bulbs in one area and its very apparent from the very bright spot in the middle). I own six of them. Home Depot sells them for $27.97 for a two pack.

    800 lumens for $13.99 is $0.0175 per lumen. Rated to last 18.3 years. That's $0.0010 per lumen per year of use. If I'm going to spent the next two decades with a bulb, I'll spend the extra three hundredths of a cent per lumen on something I really like. Still less than one fiftieth the cost of an incandescent per lumen.

    The only things I see holding back LED bulbs are misinformation and lack of availability (Home Depot is the only major brick and mortar store I've found that carries them). That, and some freaky designs that don't look like light bulbs... I bought one of these out of curiosity, and its appearance, on or off, just irritates me for some reason... if I was redesigning my living room to look like Quark's, I'd go with these all the way, but since I'm not "that guy" it's in a lamp that I almost never use. Which means it will probably outlive me. It may even survive to the 24th century and end up in Quark's.

    1. Re:Cost Per Lumen? BS! by FireFury03 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The only things I see holding back LED bulbs are misinformation and lack of availability (Home Depot is the only major brick and mortar store I've found that carries them).

      I agree, except for replacing "misinformation" with "confusing information", and the manufacturers are responsible for this. Take for example the following photo:
      https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/11607_10151447644678611_203176319_n.jpg

      We can see here, 2 GU10 bulbs. The one on the left is a 28W halogen, the one on the right is a 4.5W LED bulb (they both have a similar beam angle - 36 degrees for the halogen, 35 degrees for the LED). Both claim to be "equivalent" to a 35W "conventional" (by which I assume they mean tungsten) bulb. However, look at the light output - the halogen claims to output 600 lumen whilst the LED bulb says 200 lumen. So clearly different manufacturers use different criteria for what "equivalent" means - the halogen appears to be saying that its total light output is equivalent to a 35W tungsten, whilst the LED bulb appears to be saying that its brightness is equivalent to a (presumably unshaded) 35W tungsten. By the criteria used for the LED bulb, you could manufacture a tungsten bulb that is labelled as being "more efficient" than a tungsten bulb, simply by narrowing the beam angle with a reflector!

      Some of the bigger brands put even less information on their packaging - on the same shelves were Phillips 5W LED GU10 bulbs that simply gave an "equivalent to" figure - no information about how many lumens or candela they output, no information about beam angle.

      Also, people shopping for bulbs are almost certainly going to be doing like-for-like replacement: if I'm buying a GU10 bulb then the chances are I'm replacing an existing GU10 bulb, which is almost certainly going to be a halogen (since traditionally GU10s are halogen), not an unshaded tungsten bulb with an almost isotropic radiant flux. So telling me what "conventional" bulb it is equivalent to (whether thats done by comparing lumens or candela) is pretty much useless. Instead, I'm most likely to want to know what wattage of halogen its going to replace - if I've got a 50W halogen GU10 already and I'm buying an LED bulb, I want to know which LED bulb will give me the same results as the bulb I'm replacing.

      How is anyone supposed to make a decision when the information provided is either nonexistent or unstandardised and misleading?

      What I needed is for a standardisation of the information provided:
      1. The actual wattage of the bulb - i.e. how much power it is going to draw.
      2. The total light output in lumens.
      3. The brightness in candela. Especially important for bulbs that are traditionally used unshaded, such as GU10s.
      4. The beam angle. Again, important for bulbs that are usually unshaded.
      5. Colour temperature.
      6. What standard bulb this is equivalent to for a like-for-like replacement (i.e. if you're replacing a conventional ~isotropic tungsten bulb then it should be compared against that, if you're replacing a halogen GU10 then that bulb should be the comparison instead). Obviously this becomes problematic where the beam angles are different (e.g. I just bought a LED GU10 with a 120 degree beam - far wider than you'll get from a standard halogen GU10).
      7. The life expectancy of the bulb.

      And this information should be printed on *all* bulbs, even the conventional ones, so that someone in a shop can pick up any 2 bulbs and compare the information between them.

      I was under the impression that the EU had, several years ago, made some of this information (such as the lumen output) mandatory, but there are still a lot of bulbs on the shelves that don't include any of this data.

  20. Re:Looking forward to replacing a bulb... never by Animats · · Score: 2

    If only they lasted. We've had LED traffic lights in areas of Silicon Valley for most of a decade, and many of them are failing, one section of LEDs at a time. There's a huge bin of partially failed traffic light round LED panels at Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale. Mostly red and green; the yellows aren't on as much.

    The problem is outright failure, not dimming. That's an indication of a manufacturing problem, like a joint that fails under thermal cycling. Many pre-2004 LEDs are prone to this problem

  21. Re:but won't somebody think of the Mercury? by immaterial · · Score: 4, Funny

    Whoosh. Sense of humor. Get one.

  22. Re:but won't somebody think of the Mercury? by GenieGenieGenie · · Score: 2

    ...autism that LEDs cause?

    You forgot to mention the idiotism that it provokes.

  23. Re:but won't somebody think of the Mercury? by __aajfby9338 · · Score: 5, Funny

    LED's don't emit radio waves.

    Then you should take them back to the store for a refund.

  24. Re:but won't somebody think of the Mercury? by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Funny

    but won't somebody think of the Mercury?

    Good ol' Freddy, we still miss him

  25. Re:The Color...Ugh by Arkh89 · · Score: 2
  26. Re:but won't somebody think of the Mercury? by alostpacket · · Score: 4, Funny

    LED's do not emit a sense of humor.
    LED's don't emit a 'whooshing' sound (unless you catapult them or use a trebuchet)

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  27. Re:but won't somebody think of the Mercury? by mcgrew · · Score: 3, Informative

    Horses and dogs are mammals, but dogs aren't horses. Light and radio waves are EMF, but light isn't radio waves.

  28. Re:Looking forward to replacing a bulb... never by MachineShedFred · · Score: 2

    That sounds like a challenge to me...

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  29. Re:but won't somebody think of the Mercury? by Joce640k · · Score: 2

    Cancer causes LEDs!

    I'm sure there was an xkcd with the proof...

    --
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  30. Re:but won't somebody think of the Mercury? by X0563511 · · Score: 2

    That must be a very large LED!

    --
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