Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for May 19, 2021. Anyone that read my column in the Monday lighting for health newsletter may have sensed I was on the grumpy side. Events of the broader world have not gotten a lot better. Still, I have a smile on my face this morning. When I checked my inbox this morning, there was an announcement about a US Department of Energy (DOE) L-Prize competition.
My first thought was that someone figured out how to turn back time a decade. But no, I’m still old. I can, however, still enjoy a good L-Prize competition. I must have written 25 articles about the L-Prize for A-lamps between 2009 and 2015. The portfolio includes interviews with Jim Brodrick, then the director of the DOE SSL program, and later with Philips Lighting. I found the program fascination and it taught us that function is more significant than what a product looks like. The winning product itself disappeared from retail markets, but the innovations live on in replacement lamps and luminaires today.
The new L-Prize will be quite different in that there is no preconceived form factor. It will be focused on commercial office luminaires. And entrants will be asked to innovate on efficacy, quality of light, connectivity, lifecycle, and innovation/inclusion vectors. There is a $12.2 million prize pool and as many as two winners will share the ultimate $10 million prize — the same sum that Philips Lighting won back in 2011. I sense this more open-ended program will be fun to cover and I might top that 25 articles estimate from a decade ago.
We had some interesting packaged LED news break late last week. I intended to write a more detailed news article on the new RGBW tunable COB devices from Luminus, but time has slipped away. We did post the Luminus press release in our Company Newsfeed. The really interesting development in the tunable components is the use of phosphor-converted red and green LEDs.
I’ve written extensively about the choice between monochromatic and phosphor-converted color LEDs going back to a foundational feature article on color LEDs. You would think that monochromatic would be an automatic choice so long as the color you need is available, but that’s not always so. Monochromatic green still has an efficiency problem and even monochromatic red might not match the expected lifetime of phosphor-converted red. Luminus was able to use essentially the same LED with the same performance and lifetime for all four color channels — monochromatic blue as well as phosphor-converted white, red, and green.
We also published an article on visible light disinfection earlier this week and I mentioned it in the Monday newsletter column. There is more to that story than I have written. Dosage and test conditions are important relative to the reported germicidal efficacy. It’s probably going to require a feature-length article to explain. But for now, I’d simply advise that you learn exactly how products are tested and numbers are derived. And also there may be levels of violet light that aren’t safe for people. More to come.
Make sure that you catch the video Quick Chat that I did with Adam Lilien of UL discussing germicidal ultraviolet (UV) technology in the UV-C band below 280 nm. UL has a published specification on safely and effectively manufacturing and deploying fixed UV-C-based systems for air and surface disinfection. We expect that such Quick Chats will become a more regularly-used channel for content delivery.
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]