Megaman Catalogue 2015

 Megaman have launched their new product catalogue for 2015. With 20 years of experience in the industry, Megaman low energy lighting continues to lead the field in product design and performance. The product range has moved almost fully to LED and away from CFL as new technologies supersede old.

Megaman have also launched a brand new range of stylish fixtures, including integrated LED fittings, recessed downlights, track fittings, battens and LED panels – for applications such as retail, hotels, restaurants, homes and offices. The extensive range of interior and exterior light fittings are designed around LED lighting, promoting energy efficiency and delivering high performance lighting effects in commercial and residential applications.

Megaman are also proud to announce the introduction of some new innovative technologies, including:

 Visit Novel Energy Lighting to view our range of Megaman LED products

Working throughout the project’s design and construction phases with architect Stanton Williams and stakeholders including Network Rail, London Underground, English Heritage and local authorities, the lighting design practice was tasked with creating a subtle but characterful space for an anticipated 140,000 users a day.

To balance functional and accent lighting, StudioFractal integrated its systems into surrounding buildings. As a result, the furniture and structural elements of the space are prominently defined at night and, in line with the project brief, ambient lighting from stainless steel columns makes Lewis Cubitt’s Grade I-listed Victorian station façade a focal point of the city’s first new public square for 150 years.

StudioFractal used in-ground Iglu luminaires from architectural LED manufacturer ACDC to light the ground floor of the façade.

The listed status of Cubitt’s façade meant the luminaire fixtures had to be located in existing mortar lines to protect the integrity of the façade, and approved by Borough of Camden conservation officers and English Heritage.

Based in Gatwick, West Sussex, Studio Fractal has previously delivered a complete artificial lighting solution for Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 2, which won the Lux Award for Industrial and Transport Lighting Project of the Year in 2014.

Visit Novel Energy Lighting to discuss your architectural lighting needs. We can supply LED flood lights, wall washers, coving, and LED programmable RGB solutions such as the Color Kinetics range.

The LED Express: Virgin Trains East Coast will have soon upgraded the platform and concourse lighting at nine stations. As for the trains themselves, watch for new LED lighting in 2018, when a faster fleet from Hitachi (mock-up pictured) starts riding the rails.

‘I can see clearly now the LEDs have come.’  With apologies to song writer Johnny Nash and singer Jimmy Cliff, that is the tune that passengers on Virgin Trains’ new East Coast franchise are starting to sing now that a £1.5 million platform and concourse lighting overhaul is well under way with energy efficient LEDs.

Picking up where the line’s previous owner left off, Virgin is ripping out the old lighting at nine stations that it manages from as far north as Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish border down to Peterborough, and is also upgrading the lighting at its maintenance depot at London’s King Cross station.

The UK government started the job last August when it still owned and operated the Edinburgh-to-London mainline service, then called East Coast. A joint venture of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and transport firm Stagecoach won the franchise in November, and began operating it at the beginning of March.

The newly branded Virgin Trains East Coast is committing £140 million in upgrades to the line, an amount that should help buoy the £1.5 million lighting project, which is already complete at  the Durham and York stations.

While Virgin expects the lighting to achieve all of the standard LED benefits  such as reduced energy and maintenance bills and the elimination of mercury-containing fluorescent lights,  it is equally emphasising that the new lighting marks a big improvement in light quality.

And that translates into big improvements in customer satisfaction and safety, which passengers are alredy reporting in early surveys.

‘It’s really important  to stress that whilst new LED lighting comes with obvious environmental benefits in terms of energy costs and the life of the fittings, we’ve also been very keen to stress the customer satisfaction and safety  benefits,’ said Tim Hedley-Jones, Virgin Trains East Coast’s major projects director. ‘Replacing lighting is just as important as refurbiishing a facility or putting in a new facility at a station in terms of how a customer feels at that location.’

Noting that customer satisfaction is ‘a bit of an intangible’, Hedley-Jones elaborated on what makes successful night lighting.

‘What we find is that once we’ve done the replacement of the lighting, effectively you’re replicating a daylight scenario at the station,’ he said. ‘That’s been the anecdotal feedback from people – it is a much clearer environment at the station…It’s about how someone feels when they’re at a station. We all know how good we feel generally when the sun shines or when we’re out in the daylight.

‘So I think its about sort of getting into some of the slightly harder to pin down aspects of human behaviour that respond well to  high levels of light and to things being bright. We’ve also been doing a painting programme at some of our stations. So when you combine a bit of lighting with improved painting, you really get a feel good factor amongst customers…So customer satisfaction is a really important aspect of doing this project. It’s not just about being a good environmental custodian.’

The safety aspect is easier to pinpoint.

‘We have customers at our stations who perhaps may be carrying lots of luggage, or they may be older people, or people with young children,’ he noted. ‘Quite often they find that stations can be slightly dark, or perhaps the way to go is not clear. What we find is that once we’ve done the replacement of the lighting, again, you’re effectively replicating a daylight scenario at the station. So again there’s a real safety benefit to stop people tripping over or having accidents because they didn’t see something.’

Virgin expects to wrap up all nine stations by the end of the summer. It is close to finishing at Peterborough, Newcastle, Grantham, Doncaster and Newark, and will then move on at Berwick and Darlington. It is not upgrading lighting at a few of its smaller stations, or at Wakefield, a new station that already has modern illumination.

Virgin is refraining from installing high levels of intelligent lighting system in which, for example platform lights would remain off when not needed, and turn on when sensors detect people on the platform, because such systems could confuse train drivers.

‘These are places which are operational bits of the railway, where we have to be very careful about sort of having lights flickering on and off if there are trains coming through and obviously there’s signalling and things like that,’ Hedley-Jones explained. ‘So in this case it’s not necessarily appropriate for there to be that sort of a facility on the concourse or the platforms.’

Sensors would be more appropriate in areas like toilets or back offices, but the 9 station upgrades are focused only on concourses and platforms. Wakefield, the new station, already includes sensors in those areas, Hedley-Jones said.

As for the trains themselves: Watch for improved interior lighting in 2018, when a new fleet of trains from Japan’s Hitachi are due to come into service (the same trains shoud come online on First Great Western service in the south and west in 2017). Those will include LEDs from LPA Excil. If they allow lighting levels to tone down and warm up according to the time of day, then passengers might just find they have something else to sing about.

Novel Energy Lighting works with network rail and other rail contractors. See out Linear High Bay solutions for platforms here.

The bulb, from a UK startup called Graphene Lighting, ‘Is expected to perform significantly better and last longer than traditional LED bulbs,’ a press release from the UK’s The University of Manchester states (it must be a sign of progress if we can now refer to ‘traditional’ LED bulbs!). ‘It is expected that the graphene lightbulbs will be on the shelves in a matter of months, at a competitive cost.’

That’s a lot of great expectations from the university, which is excited because, for among other reasons, it has a financial stake in Graphene Lighting. The company is a spin-out from the National Graphene Institute, founded at the university with British and European government funding to advance commercial applications of graphene.

Graphene Lighting will coat a bulb’s LED chips with graphene, improving the bulb’s heat removal process, a university spokesperson told Lux. (For those who need reminding: LED bulbs give off light from semiconductors known as light-emitting diodes. And while LEDs are far more efficient than conventional bulbs, they’re still inefficient enough to yield heat that must dissipate).

According to the press release, the graphene leads to ‘lower energy emissions, longer lifetime and lower manufacturing costs.’ The university would not quantify those improvements.

A BBC story  suggested that the bulb will cut energy consumption by 10 per cent over other LED bulbs because it enhances electrical conductivity. The Financial Times (registration may be required), which appears to have broken the story about the bulb, also suggested a 10 per cent improvement.

The university spokesperson told Lux that ‘it’s too early to say,’ whether the 10 per cent figure is accurate.

The BBC story said the bulb uses a filament-shaped LED. The FT said it will be priced lower than the ‘£15 and more’ that it said is typical for comparable dimmable LED bulbs.

Lux has requested an interview with Prof Colin Bailey, a director of Graphene Lighting and deputy president of The University of Manchester, to find out more about the lamp’s workings.

The University of Manchester is the birthplace of graphene. Scientists Sir Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov first isolated the wonder material there in 2004, an achievement that earned them the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

‘This lightbulb shows that graphene products are becoming a reality, just a little more than a decade after it was first isolated – a very short time in scientific terms,’ Prof Bailey said in the press release.

Graphene is a one-atom thin sheet of carbon heralded for having the strength of Superman and conductivity that’s 100 times better than today’s silicon-based semiconductors.

While graphene orginated in the UK, at one point China had shot ahead in the graphene intelllectual property race .

Potential uses span from building materials through energy and electronics, including semiconductors, solar cells and of course, light bulbs. The BBC noted that it is already used in tennis rackets and skis.

Two years ago, researchers in South Korea and Vietnam said that graphene would help dissipate heat from LED bulbs, and which would help make bulbs brighter.

Graphene Lighting appears close to delivering a graphene lamp. They’ll be under pressure to come through, lest they deflate expectations.

Visit Novel Energy Lighting to explore all your LED lamp and bulb needs

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Photo is from The University of Manchester