Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) have finally made it into almost all of residential and commercial fixtures. Almost half of the general lighting market is made of LED production against its competition of fluorescents and bulbs. With the ever increasing demand for LEDs, it has become a challenge for engineers and designers to make this product as durable and suitable to every need and every location of the customer.
Although the LED technology has been in the market for a few decades, it is still not a perfect product and engineers are continuously innovating to improve its performance.
A common problem with LED lighting has something to do with thermal issues. When exposed to too much heat, LEDs tend to have premature failures as they lose their brightness when thermally stressed. As a result, the LED bulb or bar will degrade much quicker than the manufacturer intended. There is a need for additional cost for the emitters to balance the thermal design in order to live by its promise of a solid state lighting.
Statistics have shown that around 20% to 50% of all electrical energy worldwide is used for lighting. As more and more residential and commercial buildings are increasing day by day, the demand for light correspondingly rises.
Improving efficiency is one solution to mitigate the rising trend of power consumption and has the focus of the lighting industry. The LED technology is just in time for this energy crisis, to replace the old fluorescent and incandescent bulbs, for example.
The latest LEDs have efficacy of 100 or more lumens per watt - just what the general lighting application requires. One of the earliest issues converting fixture designs from incandescent bulbs to LEDs is the difference in thermal characteristics. LED manufacturers can now actually publish life curves for their emitters as a function of temperature, a technology unique to all the other kinds of light bulbs.
It has already been previously mentioned that LED weakens because of improper thermal design. To solve this problem, manufacturers have conducted away the waste heat produced by LEDs.
Manufacturers designed a way to fix thermal and cost issues and started using passive cooling. The new LED has been designed to produce lesser heat, and to have greater resistance against heat, making it more efficient with a longer life span. This requires the fixture or bulb to have a large heat-sink engineered into the design that provides a low resistance path for the heat to flow away from the LED.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Joseph_Donovan/2278646
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