Recently green society has been a hot discussed issue almost on everyone’s lips. Creating a green society is the common goal of the whole society and the whole world. If you pay little attention to the world news, you may have the knowledge that there has been a series of international meetings held for the issues on green environment. And LED fluorescent tubes are a kind of electric light that meets the needs of green society. They emerge on the background of greatly advocating environmental protection and represent the future of electric lighting. The following is some latest information about LED products and let’s share them together.
I’m just back from Chicago, where I was attending the Greenbuild Conference of the U.S. Green Building Council. Despite the weak economy, some 27,000 architects, builders, developers, and manufacturers gathered for this 9th annual conference. At Greenbuild, I moderated an interactive session looking at “hype vs. reality” with LED lighting. Indeed, there is a lot of hype out there (more on that below), but the bottom line is that there are some amazing products coming onto the market. By way of background, LED fluorescent tubes (LED for “light-emitting diode”) is the future of electric lighting. These highly concentrated light sources rely on semiconductor materials to convert electric current directly into light, without heating up a metal filament, as occurs with incandescent lights, or passing an electric arc through mercury gas, as happens with fluorescent, metal halide, and high-pressure sodium lights.
Since LED fluorescent light has been popular among the public and gladly accepted, we may doubt that why they can get so much popularity among the public and why they can be so successful. Obviously it should be owed to its superiority advantages. In the following part we will have a detail discussion on LED products’ primary advantages, which may offer answers to your puzzle.
LED fluorescent lamps have three primary advantages over other lighting sources: First, it’s much more efficient than incandescent lighting. We refer to lighting efficiency as “efficacy” and measure it in lumens of light output per watt of electricity consumed. Incandescent light bulbs have efficacies of 10-15 lumens per watt, while compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) come in at 50-70 lumens per watt (lpw) and tubular fluorescent lamps produce as much as 100 lpw. Most LED light sources today deliver 35-60 lpw, though a few exceed 80 lpw. Thus, even though it’s often touted as more efficient than fluorescent lighting, most LED lighting today actually has lower efficacy than the best tubular fluorescent lights. Second, LEDs avoid the mercury that used in fluorescent, metal halide, sodium, and mercury-vapor lamps. Mercury is a highly toxic heavy metal; when older fluorescent, metal halide, sodium, or mercury vapor lamps are discarded, there is risk that the mercury in them can escape into the environment–especially if municipal solid waste is incinerated. The Xicato LED Spot Module uses remote phosphor technology and a modular design to provide high-quality light and fast, easy assembly by fixture manufacturers. The LED module needs to be coupled with a heat sink, reflector, and LED driver, all of which are shown in the photo above. Photo: Xicato Click on image to enlarge. Third, well-engineered LED lights last a long time. They can last over 50,000 hours–50 times as long as standard incandescent bulbs, five to ten times as long as compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), and two to four times as long as linear fluorescent lights.
The unique advantages of LED products determine its big success. Although in the above we have talked that LED products have great advantageous over the ordinary ones, producing high quality LED products is not an easy thing. This may be attributed to various factors and we still need to work hard.
Creating high-quality white light with LEDs is pretty hard. The first LEDs produced red or green light–these are widely used as indicator lights on stereo equipment and other electronics. To produce white light, manufacturers either combine colored LEDs in carefully balanced mixes (you might remember from high school physics that white is a combination of other colors), or they use phosphor coatings that absorb the colored light and reradiate white light. However, the emergence of led fluorescent replacement strengthens our confidence in producing higher quality products.
All of us feel excited about the emerging of LED fluorescent lamps which are environmental friendly and energy saving. Although nowadays science and technology develops at a striking speed and LED products have got fully developed, we should not be satisfied with the achievements we have made. This is not the end. And we are still on the road to explore better quality products to serve the public and the whole world. All of us including we single person, the government, the associations and even the whole world should joint their efforts to make contributions to our home—the only Earth.