LED Chandelier is Completely Green (Powered!)
Found this over at GroovyGreen..
Behold! The wonderful efficiency of next-gen LED lighting is now being integrated with the grandeur of luxury illumination — specifically, massive chandeliers. Even more specific – the world’s largest chandelier currently installed at the Stanley theatre in Utica, New York.
This chandelier — weighing in at almost 7,000 pounds, 35 feet in diameter, 17 feet tall — uses 328 LEDs manufactured by Philips Luxeon and consumes just 1,120 watts of electricity. That’s almost seven times more efficient than conventional light bulbs. Not to mention the fact that will be many years before workers have to replace any of the bulbs due to burnout. Unless, of course, the Phantom has anything to say about it.
Damn Phantom.
Discovery Science talks about LED Lighting in this Quick Video
We found this episode of Discovery Science the other day while surfing around, one of the segments was about LED lighting. We cut it out, and uploaded it to youtube for your enjoyment.
Visualize the wind with LED Light Firewinder.
Found this over at inhabitat today.. pretty neat, and not that expensive for LED technology.
This might not be the most practical outdoor light in the world, but what the Firewinder lacks in pedestrian utility it makes up for in sheer engaging awesomeness. Transforming wind into light, the Firewinder is a hanging, wind-powered LED light that can be powered by the smallest breeze. Unlike most wind turbines that spin vertically, the Firewinder spins in a horizontal direction, illuminating its LEDs in a spiraling helix of light. The coolest thing about the Firewinder is that it doesn’t just run on or off, but instead is visibly reactive to subtle changes in the environment. How bright the LEDs glow corresponds directly to how fast the turbine spins, enabling observers to visualize the power of wind.
Created by UK inventor Tom Lawton, the Firewinder was inspired by his desire to ’see the wind’. Lawton hopes his new design will inspire people to think about the invisible beauty, awesome power and endless resource of the alternative energies which encircle us.
Decorative as it is, we think this is a charming design which has the power to engage people with the beauty of clean, renewable wind power. Kudos to Tom Lawton for coming up with this beautiful idea!
£99.95 from Firewinder.com >>
(Available summer 2008)
Flashing LED Solar-Powered Safety Bike Light Provides Visibility in Nighttime Outdoor Activities
Read the complete and down-load the high quality picture at: http://www.ledtronics.com
TORRANCE, CA — March 25, 2008 — LEDtronics® announces its latest solar-powered LED safety light for outdoor evening activities, such as bicycling, walking, jogging and inline skating. Now any outdoorsman can carry an extra measure of security into the backcountry or when battling for a spot on the concrete jungle, with a new compact and lightweight Flashing LED Solar-Powered Safety Bike Light.
Time and time again traffic safety studies have shown that bicyclists experience higher safety rates with the use of lights that make them more visible to motorists, during both the day and night. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s statistics, 33 percent of bicyclist fatalities in 2002 occurred between the hours of 5:00 pm and 9:00 pm. A more recent study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 22% of bicyclist fatalities in 2006 occurred between 6 pm and 9 pm—the most during the day, while 18% took place between 9 pm and midnight.
The most common advice given by biking magazines and websites: “If you’re riding at night, you absolutely should use a flashing red rear light.” They all agree that bicycle reflectors are not sufficient for safety. Some states have even enacted laws to that effect. Maine, for example, requires bicyclists to have a headlight and red taillight visible from at least 500 feet when riding at night.
The Flashing LED Solar-Powered Safety Bike Light by LEDtronics® is just the unit for this purpose. It is very compact, yet it produces a repeating flash that can be seen from up to 2,000 feet away, depending on atmospheric conditions and line of sight.
Read the complete and down-load the high quality picture at: http://www.ledtronics.com
Direct product web page link is: http://www.ledtronics.com/ds
Cheap LEDs could power much of Africa, and beyond.
Coupled with the previous post from Inhabitat, there was also another article on there today that caught our eye. It seems that Popular Mechanics is even jumping on with the benefits of LED Lights, not only for christmas lights and new LED lamps, but now for global aide. LED’s provide a great, cheap (in the long run) source of lighting for lesser developed nations. Plus, with the added benefit that many of these nations are under constant sun, Solar power can be used to power much of them, or recharge the batteries for night time use. Talk about environmental eh?
From the article ..
We love our LEDs for lamps and Christmas lights, but there’s a global application for LEDs that could bring inexpensive and efficient light to the 75% of Africa that lacks dependable access to clean, safe electrical lighting. (In Sub-Saharan Africa over 500 million people presently lack modern energy, and rural electricity access rates is only 2%.) A $13 million World Bank Group Initiative called Lighting Africa was launched in September 2007 to develop and distribute a highly efficient and rugged LED light bulb for the electricity-deprived in Africa.
Evan Mills, a researcher with California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is the man who helped write the proposal which led to Lighting Africa. He has laid emphasis on the use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as the affordable source of lighting in Africa. The principles of producing light are different in an incandescent bulb (contains a filament that emits heat, some of which is visible), a CFL (emits light when charged mercury vapor excites the bulb’s phosphorus coating), and an LED. The process used by LEDs is different from the two: here electrons are converted directly to light-emitting photons. The process is cleaner, and does not pose risks associated with disposal of mercury in CFLs.
The researchers at the California Lighting Technology Center at the University of California, Davis, are working towards increasing the lumens per watt from LEDs to increase efficiency. In order to exploit LEDs in best possible way for African conditions they would be integrated with best optics, rechargeable batteries and charging systems, and housed in a casing that could last years.
Lighting Africa is also aiming to bring down the cost of developing LEDs; it would award 20 grants of up to $200,000 to companies and institutions. The whole endeavor would serve several goods at once: provide affordable light to the people in Africa, try to mitigate the problems associated with disposal of mercury in CFLs, reduce the use of kerosene, which, in turn, would reduce pollution; and give social justice as Evan Mills says, “The number of people without adequate light is greater than the entire world population when Edison invented the light bulb.”
GE Announces a breakthrough in low-cost, organic LED (OLED) production
We found this over on inhabitat today..originally from the GE Blog
With all the issues facing the planet, man produced or not, we really like seeing new technologies like this being produced. I’ve been to India, and I’ve seen the good LED Lighting can do there. LED’s in the long run, are extremely cheap, and offer great lighting alternatives, with often better ambient lighting in my opinion. With new technologies like the ones that GE are working on with OLEDS, we quickly see this as becoming a viable alternative to regular light bulbs, cfl or otherwise.
From the Article:
Hey everyone. We have a big development in the lab to report.
Since the early days of OLED research, people have said that OLEDs could potentially be made at very low cost because they don’t require expensive semiconductor manufacturing techniques. The ultimate low cost fabrication method would be a continuous “roll-to-roll” process like what is done in newspaper printing. However, so far, no one has demonstrated that OLEDs can be made this way. So about 4 years ago, we set out to find out for ourselves whether it could be done. We found a partner company (Energy Conversion Devices or ECD) with great experience at making roll-to-roll equipment and together we were successful in winning a proposal that we submitted to a government agency (NIST) looking to help fund high risk technology development.
Our proposal was to build a research roll-to-roll line for making OLEDs and our deliverable was to show that OLEDs could be made on it. We’ve been working to make this happen for the past 4 years. This means that we’ve been working to develop OLED device designs and fabrication processes that are compatible with roll-to-roll processing and to design and build individual equipment modules and then integrate them into a working line. Because this had never been done before, we faced some real technical challenges – especially given our program time constraints that often meant we had to start designing machine modules before we had the device fabrication process completely figured out! Anyway, in the end it all came together and we were successful in making our deliverable. Here’s picture proof that we were able to make OLEDs using our roll-to-roll machine.
Going forward, we’ll be using this machine to try to move from manufacturing research to real manufacturing. Still a lot of process and machine development to go but our recent success has energized us to keep going!
GE Announces OLED Manufacturing Breakthrough
From Slashdot..
“Today GE announced the successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices (press release). This demonstration is a key step toward making OLEDs and other high-performance organic electronics products at dramatically lower costs than what is possible today. The green crowd is thrilled as well. Personally, as the parent of a 3-year-old technophile, I’m dreading the animated cereal boxes.”
Natures Tough Little Swimmers Intensify LED Light.. Literally
Salmon are commonly known as one of the stronger swimmers in the animal kingdom, now it turns out their little man army can also increase the output of LEDs… as engadget displays
below..
See, the problem with bioengineering isn’t moral or ethical dilemmas, or even homicidal robo-droids enslaving humanity. It’s that if you let researchers go wild, eventually they’ll find a way to make LEDs out of salmon sperm, threatening the sanctity (and sperm-free-ness) of your entire gadget-based lifestyle. Yet that’s exactly what Professor Andrew Steckl of the University of Cincinnati has managed to do, using the DNA found in salmon sperm to enhance the brightness of LEDs. The so-called BioLEDs are being developed in cooperation with the Air Force (yes, the Air Force — they had a “good source” of salmon sperm, apparently) and they’ve been so successful that Steckl has been getting salmon sperm from researchers worldwide “wanting to see if their sperm is good enough.” Steckl says that since salmon sperm is considered a waste product of the fishing industry, BioLEDs are particularly green — kind of like our faces right now.