Feature: LEDs
LED technology innovations continue to march on
By Francois Mirand, EMEA Technical Director, Future Lighting Solutions, a division of Future Electronics
T
he LED lighting industry has been an exciting field over the past 20 years because the technology develops at such a rapid pace. Tis creates not only the opportunity
to improve the design of existing types of fixtures, but also to create entirely new applications for lighting and displays. Who imagined 20 years ago that the shape and illumination pattern of something as simple as a car’s indicator light could become an important part of the brand signature of a premium marque such as Audi, or that the street scene in cities all around the world would be newly filled with colour at night thanks to LED streetlights and displays?
Diverse approaches Focusing on LEDs indoors, the lumen- per-watt race attracts far less attention than before, and LED manufacturers now compete to introduce innovations that improve the quality of their products’ light. Colour rendering is one important parameter of quality: mainstream LEDs today generally offer 80 and 90 CRI variations, whereas
95 CRI has become common in the premium LED market. In addition, several LED manufacturers now specify an R9 value – a score that represents how accurately a light source will reproduce strong red colors: Nichia has released COB LEDs that offer minimum Ra 95 and R9 80 values. Uniformity is another challenge for
manufacturers who seek to meet designers’ strict demands for quality of light. Here, Lumileds with its LUXEON Deep Dimming products and Nichia with 757-MT are providing new solutions for luminaires implementing deep DC dimming and tunable white lighting. Meanwhile, the jury is still out on the best
way to stimulate public appreciation of the concept of natural or human-centric lighting (HCL). Scientific consensus about spectral effects on human health is still hard to find. Nevertheless, the choice of LED sources for HCL grows apace. It includes both full-spectrum LED sources such as Seoul Semiconductor’s SunLike range, Nichia’s Optisolis LEDs and Bridgelux Trive family; and cyan-enhanced products such as Nichia’s Vitasolis or the Luminus Salud range.
30 July/August 2021
www.electronicsworld.co.uk Real-world deployments remain scarce,
but this year is seeing some growth in this field, sparked by a 2020 study by the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics on the perception of full-spectrum LEDs, which showed advantages in HCL over conventional LED lighting. One expression of HCL is circadian
lighting in which the colour temperature is adjusted throughout the day to match the natural spectral variation in sunlight and to mimic the spectral characteristics of natural firelight at night. Bridgelux provides a way to ease the implementation of the tunable white systems required for circadian lighting, with its Vesta Flex drivers and Vesta Trive LED modules. Tis turnkey solution includes full- spectrum tunable white LED light sources, dual-channel drivers and control interfaces which support standard 0-10V, DALI and Qualified Bluetooth mesh systems, as well as proprietary control protocols. Qualified Bluetooth mesh, also known as
SIG mesh, has become the wireless control protocol of choice for indoor lighting, adopted by several important players in the industry. Te standard has delivered on
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