Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Nov. 11, 2020. Wow, our newsletter again this week will be dominated by the impact of the coronavirus and that pandemic continues in my case to be a mental strain that I seem not to be able to avoid. I’m fine while fully engaged with work, but can’t miss the increasing impact otherwise. San Diego County in California where I live is now being moved by Governor Newsom into the purple or worst category on infections. That will further restrict businesses, although my wife and I have not dined at a restaurant since early March anyway. The change, however, will not likely coerce the behavior needed to curb the pandemic.
As I have confessed before, I spend far too much mental energy focused on sports, but there is little escape in that direction for me this week. My Auburn Tigers will not play college football Saturday due to COVID-19. But in a strange twist of the 2020 calendar, I will watch the Masters golf tournament play out in the fall with no azaleas in bloom.
And getting back to LEDs and the solid-state lighting (SSL) sector, the coronavirus continues to impact our industries in so many ways. The forward push on UV-C-band LED technology continues. Luminus Devices has new LEDs that can deliver as much as 400 mW of radiometric power at 275 nm by integrating four emitters into a discrete package. In that same story, we covered an LED-based UV-C light engine from ProPhotonix. Both of those products are aimed at deactivating SARS-CoV-2.
The coronavirus even impacted the ongoing transition happening at the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, even though we did not know of that impact when we first reported that former LRC director Mariana Figueiro and most of the research staff would move to a new research center within Rutgers University. We have since learned that transition would instead be to Mount Sinai and association with that teaching medical school. What we didn’t know was that Mount Sinai had been the original plan for the LRC transition but was disrupted by the surge of COVID-19 infections in New York last spring.
We also covered a unique implementation of UV-C LEDs into a system for disinfecting medical imaging systems such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), CT (computerized tomography), and similar systems. PDC Facilities developed the portable system that can disinfect the table and bore of such equipment between patients.
I’m beginning to think I will never again attend an in-person industry event and I sense that same exhaustive feeling in others as I communicate with people in the industry every day. We learned yesterday that LightFair International 2021 is postponing to Oct. 27–29, 2021 in New York. That’s clearly a preemptive measure but probably a good decision. We had previously postponed our Strategies in Light event from February 2021 to June. Of course you know we have recently hosted two virtual events, the HortiCann Light + Tech conference and our Renaissance of Light Quality conference. You can still view sessions and other resources from those events on demand and there is a huge amount of information online.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]