Fredfish
11/15/2002, 03:19 PM
I have seen a number of posts talking about LED lighting as a replacement for conventional reef lighting. I thought I would post a link to some articles on the state of the art of LED lighting.
http://www.lumileds.com/newsandevents/news_index.html
The best of the articles I have read are published by the IEEE and Physics Today.
According to them,based on current tecnology and the rate of innovation, White LED lighting will not be an economical replacement for Fluorescent lighting until 2012. Part of it has to do with flaws in the technology and part is economics.
Now, they are talking about common lighting applications. I suspect they are comparing to the common fluorescents that cost $2.00 retail or less. Still, it will probably be a few years before the get the lumen output needed for aquarium applications.
If you look around on the Lumileds site, there is a chart that shows the efficiency of state-of-the-art LED lighting compared to other light sources. Red leds were about as efficient as Fluorescent with white leds being about 1/2 the efficiency.
Its a pretty cool technology with lots of promise.
Another alternative that I read about several years ago in Scientific American (Dec 2000 I think) is carbon nanotubes.
This technology promises to be 99% efficient. The problem here is consistancy of manufacturing. At the time there were supposed to be some flat pannel display prototypes being produced with expected commercial introduction within 1 to 2 years. I havn't heard anything on them since then so I expect that they have run into difficulties with commercial production.
Enjoy,
Fred.
http://www.lumileds.com/newsandevents/news_index.html
The best of the articles I have read are published by the IEEE and Physics Today.
According to them,based on current tecnology and the rate of innovation, White LED lighting will not be an economical replacement for Fluorescent lighting until 2012. Part of it has to do with flaws in the technology and part is economics.
Now, they are talking about common lighting applications. I suspect they are comparing to the common fluorescents that cost $2.00 retail or less. Still, it will probably be a few years before the get the lumen output needed for aquarium applications.
If you look around on the Lumileds site, there is a chart that shows the efficiency of state-of-the-art LED lighting compared to other light sources. Red leds were about as efficient as Fluorescent with white leds being about 1/2 the efficiency.
Its a pretty cool technology with lots of promise.
Another alternative that I read about several years ago in Scientific American (Dec 2000 I think) is carbon nanotubes.
This technology promises to be 99% efficient. The problem here is consistancy of manufacturing. At the time there were supposed to be some flat pannel display prototypes being produced with expected commercial introduction within 1 to 2 years. I havn't heard anything on them since then so I expect that they have run into difficulties with commercial production.
Enjoy,
Fred.