Continued testing on LiFi capabilities are in train prior to a long-anticipated roll-out of the system in Paris Metro stations.

A French firm has won the contract to supply internet-over-lighting technology on the Paris Metro.

The ambitious project – which will allow over two million daily commuters to use lights as a form of Wi-fi, dubbed ‘Li-fi’ – now looks firmly on track. Already La Defense station has been successfully equipped with the tech.

Paris-based Oledcomm, a spin-off of the University of Versailles, won the contract from RAPT to initially supply Li-fi installations in 66 stations across Paris, involving over 250,000 LED luminaires.

The award of the contract by RATP follows an extensive series of test phases before the roll-out goes ahead. The first phase of the work involved a series of evaluations to prove the concept. This work was done in a so-called Fab Lab environment, community-based workshops where entrepreneurs, students, small businesses come together to develop technology.

The system needed to demonstrate that it could deliver on its core promises of a Li-fi installation, especially on four key criteria:

• The Li-fi can operate within a complex physical environment
• The system can provide the bi-directional communications needed for a secure internet connection
• Traffic and security information can be ‘pushed’ to smart phones as necessary
• A system of audio-messaging could be developed to enable tourists and people with impaired sight to be guided around the tunnels and concourses of an underground station

The Fab Lab process also presented commercial opportunities to other entrepreneurial groups to use the open-source nature of the system to develop apps that could work alongside the core Li-fi service.

Having successfully completed the test-house phase, the next phase of the contract moved into the real world with an installation of Li-fi-enabled LED luminaires at the Metro station at La Defense.

Chosen for its complexity, La Defense provides all of the real-life difficulties that a Li-fi installation will need to overcome if it’s to prove its worth to the transport system operators.

Once all of the testing has been successfully completed and RATP is confident of the platform, it’s expected that Paris will become the first public transportation system in world with Li-fi connectivity.

Oledcomm, formed in  in 2005, installed its first public Li-fi project at the Musee Curtius in Liege in 2012. Since then, the company has gone on to install systems in offices, hospitals, retail stores as well as public street lighting.

Li-fi works by making invisible modulations to the light from a luminaire – invisible to the human eye, but not to the camera on a smartphone, tablet or laptop. The same technology lies behind the positioning systems being used by retailers such as Carrefour and Target, but here it is being used to send data, rather than just to pinpoint someone’s position. Proponents of Li-fi say that it will add enormous capacity to wireless communications, because the visible light spectrum is 10,000 times larger than the radio frequency spectrum that Wi-fi uses. Some also note that it will operate much faster than Wi-fi, and that it will be useful in electromagnetic sensitive areas like hospital, airplanes and nuclear power plants.

It’s currently not clear how devices will communicate back to the lighting on the Paris Metro installation. However, it is relatively straightforward to use different wavelengths for each link direction, i.e., visible light in the downlink (to also serve as illumination) and infrared or even standard Wi-fi in the uplink.

On the downside, Li-Fi signals do not travel as far as Wi-Fi signals do.

led light communications · led lighting · led subway · li-fi · lifi · metro lighting · Novel Energy Lighting · railway lighting · station lifi · station lighting

Lighting designers are being asked to submit ideas for an ambitious £20 million plan to turn the Thames into a river of light.

This project is unprecedented in its boldness and imagination’

Hannah Rothschild of the Illuminated River Foundation

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Defective emergency lighting fixtures have landed The Wildwood restaurant chain in court.

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Tunable-white lighting is one of the biggest trends in commercial lighting. LED developers have taken a serious grip on the photo-biological research being produced by university departments and other groups. We know more about the way that humans function than ever before and you might say that it’s fortunate for the LED community that the science appears to support a practical technology that is perfectly suited to LED exploitation.

Tunable whites use colour mixing

Standard LED colour-mixing uses red, green and blue channels that are adjusted to deliver the entire range of the colour spectrum. Tunable-whites work in the similar way, using of a number of controllable channels to adjust the colour temperature of the luminaire’s white light output. The channels in a tunable-white system all produce white light, but with varying colour temperatures, from a warm tone to a cool tone.

Inevitably, there are levels of sophistication involved in tunable-white systems and it’s vital that the specifier understands not only what is required from the lighting, but also what any particular system is capable of delivering.

Simple systems use two lines of LEDs

Take a warm white LED and sit it next to a cool white LED and cross-dim between the two. Job done? Well, not quite. It’s true that the cheapest tunable whites work in exactly this way. The most basic tunable linear systems use LED strips mounted side-by-side. One channel will be close to 2700K in colour temperature, with the other up around a cool 6000K. The LED strips are mounted inside an aluminium extrusion fitted with an opal diffuser, which does the colour mixing as the light passes through it. It’s very simple engineering but satisfies a basic market with low performance expectations.

Multi-chip versions do the mixing at chip level

More products are using ‘multi-chips’ where a number of tiny LED chips are combined into the same module. This means that the colour mixing occurs as the light leaves the module. Their very small size means that tunable-white products can be made much smaller, so we’re starting to see downlights using the technology as well as linear systems. These multi-chips tend to have a higher performance specification than the individual LED strips, but nothing should be left to chance.

Colour rendering can be compromised

A lot of fuss is made, quite rightly, over the way that white light presents surface colours. We’ve come to expect a good quality of colour rendering, regardless of light source. Tunable whites are not exempt from this issue but it’s not always clear from manufacturers’ data how well a system is performing.

Cheaper products may advertise good colour performance at the extremes of the tunable range, where light is being delivered from either the warm or the cool channel, but there’s no certainty that the mixed light performs equally well. Generally speaking, the greater the number of channels, and systems vary from two-channel to five-channel, the better colours will look under them.

Not all tunable-white systems cover the same colour range

If there is one aspect of tunable-whites that the specifier needs to take great care over, it’s the colour temperature range that’s on offer. While some systems offer a wide natural ‘circadian rhythm’ range that shifts from candlelight to daylight, there are other systems with a much smaller range, from 2500K to 4000K, which should only be considered as a decorative option.

There are three ways to control the tones

• The simplest systems use manual control to alter the white outputs. Expect to see a wall-mounted control panel or a hand-held remote control that enables you to adjust the colour of the light and the amount of light output. There is nothing scientific about this. It’s left entirely to personal preference, which may – or may not – be a good thing.
• Some tunable controls are designed to replicate the effect of dimming on a filament source, where two things happen at the same time. As the light output is dimmed, the lamp warms up in the same way as a traditional tungsten filament lamp. This is still a manual control method, but has the benefit of mimicking a filament light source. The tunable range tends to be very small, again mimicking the conventional tungsten lamp.
• More sophisticated control strategies are designed to manipulate the circadian rhythm of room occupants. This means that the lighting settings are programmed into the control architecture. Shifts in colour temperature and light level can be pre-set or can be instigated by a manual over-ride. This is the method that’s being used in recent school installations in Scandinavia.

Three discrete channels could be a solution

It’s been pointed out that not all ‘tunable-white’ mixing requires a full colour range. Complex tunable-white schemes mean that you should be able to call up any colour temperature within the mixing range. But some clients will call for specific colour temperatures, often those that are commercially available, such as 3000K, 4000K, 6500K. If that’s the case, then it may be simpler – and cheaper – to consider having three discrete lighting channels operating separately within a bespoke housing.

Photo credit: Glamox Luxo

colour temperature · LED downlights · led lighting · led panels · Novel Energy Lighting · school lighting · tunable light · tunable wite light

Philips recalls thousands of metal halide lamps over ‘burn and laceration’ dangers. PLUS: The latest business news including acquisitions. Lux Today webcast for 31 May 2016 is presented by Courtney Ferguson.

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Lux reports: A tech revolution is happening in lighting – and the speed of development is blistering. Here we identify the biggest trends you need to know about. And a few are rather surprising….

1 Indoor location tracking

The latest tech uses lights in conjunction with smart phones to accurately locate people with 10cm accuracy within an indoor space. Once the building owner knows where you are, they can interact with you to deliver real time marketing messages or offer better services, or perhaps they’ll just track what you do and figure out how to use the data.

Who to watch: Acuity Brands, Philips

2 Camera-based lighting control

Lighting controls today typically use infrared, ultrasonic or microwave sensors to detect movement, which means they are liable to false triggering or switching prematurely when people aren’t moving. Camera technology is so cheap (you probably have two in your smart phone) that they are now being used in lighting control.

Who to watch: EWO, Zumtobel, Steinel, Hubbell

3 Self-learning control systems

The concept of a device learning its own settings has been pioneered by Google’s acclaimed Nest Labs in its thermostats. The concept lends itself perfectly to lighting controls so that sector is examining how the approach can be adopted to enable the system to self-commission and learn how a space is being used over time.

Who to watch: Helvar

4 Super capacitors

The Achilles’ heel of emergency lighting is batteries, which degrade over time. However, the improvements in efficiency of LEDs and advancing capacitor technology mean it is possible to get an hour of lighting back-up without batteries. This means that emergency lighting can have a maintenance free life of up to 10 years.

Who to watch: Teknoware, Ledo

5 Integrated street lights

Street lights or rather the columns which hold them off the ground used to be a convenient place for dogs to use as toilets, now they’re being crammed full or other technology from CCTV systems, PA speakers, Wifi transmitters and electric car charging points. This reduces street clutter and could provide funding streams for public lighting.

Who to watch: Schreder, Hess, Philips

6 Inductive power coupling

Although this technology has been around for years – it’s used to charge your electric toothbrush – manufacturers are now exploring ways in which it can used for lighting. It’s a perfect way to install an unground uplight and avoid the age old issue of water ingress, or connect a retail lighting display to power without wires.

Who to watch: Auraled, Design LED Products

7 DC power networks

The battle of the currents was settled in favour of AC back in the 1890s, but LEDs and a proliferation of low-power devices mean Round Two has started. Power over Ethernet (PoE) is one embodiment bundled up as part of a computer network, but we’ve also seen DC-powered track lighting, which results in smaller fixtures.

Who to watch: Cisco, Zumtobel

8 Lights which aren’t just lights

With sensors becoming so cheap, and lights getting connected to the Internet, light fixtures are starting to get packed out with sensors not related to lighting, such as ambient temperature and air quality.  That data can be shared with other building services or harvested for other big data applications.

Who to watch: Gooee, Sensity Systems, Acuity Brands

9 Miniaturisation

Everything in lighting is starting to shrink dramatically. Think chip-scale LED arrays, compact optical systems and ultra thin LED drivers (the smallest we’ve seen is just 13mm high). This should result in ultra-small downlights, in-ground uprights and super-slim linear fixtures, and lower materials costs for the manufacturer.

Who to watch: Lumileds, Samsung, Osram, iGuzzini

10 Li-Fi

Wi-fi over lighting, or Li-Fi to give it the name coined by inventor Harold Haas, can transmit data 100 times faster than wifi by modulating the light, which would mean you could download the entire set of Star Wars movies in around one second. It works by pulsing the LED light at extremely high frequencies which is undetectable to the human eye.

Who to watch: PureLifi, Toshiba

dc power networks · google nest · indoor location tracking · inductive power coupling · integrated street lights · lifi · lighting trends · Novel Energy Lighting · super capacitors · wifi lighting

The Time Square office building in Bracknell is home to Bracknell Forest Council. The building is typical of many UK office blocks and required a complete refurbishment, including a lighting upgrade.

The old lighting comprised 1x58W switchstart luminaires with cat 2 louvres arranged in rows within a metal plank ceiling across the office space. The luminaire design combined with old technology meant the ceiling and walls appeared very dark, creating a gloomy effect below the optimum lighting specification for offices.

 
Two schemes were put forward for consideration: 1x55W TC-L with high frequency dimmable
control gear and 1x42W LED with dimmable gear. The latter scheme was chosen with the contemporary recessed Quattro LED luminaire because it offered maximum energy savings. In comparison to the existing 1x58W switchstart luminaire, Quattro LED offered a 37% energy saving on connected load. Significantly, over a 12-year period, Quattro LED also offered an energy and maintenance saving of £45,543 compared to the fluorescent alternative.

Lighting controls further increase energy savings
Part of the upgrade also included the installation of daylight and presence lighting controls using Sensa Link to ensure the lighting uses the minimum amount of energy required to meet the new design specification. The new lighting levels have been designed to achieve 450 lux on the working plane with sensors programmed to dim the lights in groups according to daylight and occupancy. With the inclusion of lighting controls, lighting is only used when required, increasing the energy savings over and above the 37% achieved by upgrading to LED.

Comfortable lighting fit for the environment
The office lighting has been brought up to the latest lighting standards to support the wide variety of
office-based tasks. With excellent colour rendition and superb light quality, the Quattro LED luminaires have transformed the working environment into a bright, vibrant space. The office is now a comfortable place to work, facilitating everyday tasks such as reading, writing and working with a computer screen, as well as clear communication between people As well as the lighting technology upgrade, the office has also been redecorated. This has increased the reflected light within the space and in turn creates further energy savings.

As part of the refurbishment, the emergency lighting has also been upgraded to LED using the Thorn Voyager LED series range. The addition of Explorer emergency lighting controls give a central emergency testing facility across the building.

Controls used

Sensa Link controls
Explorer emergency controls
Key Facts

Energy consumption reduced by 37%
450 lux
Colour rendition: Ra80

Visit www.novelenergylighting.com to explore our range of Thorn LED Lighting, or call us to discuss project specification and pricing.
T: 0208-540-8287
E: sales@novelenergylighting.com

energy efficient lighting · led lighting controls · Novel Energy Lighting · office led · office lighting · sensa link · thorn led · thorn lighting · thorn quattro led · thorn voyager led · tube retrofit

The lighting industry is gearing up to launch a key weapon in the war on the deadly Zika virus – special LED lights.

Fred Maxik, the chief technology officer of Lighting Science, is exploring the possibility of constructing a special trap for the mosquito which carries the life-threatening infection.

Transmitted via a bite from the yellow fever mosquito, Zika is extremely serious for pregnant women, as there’s evidence it causes birth defects such as abnormally small heads. Experts now warn that they expect the Zika virus to spread to all countries in the Americas, including the Caribbean, except Chile and Canada.

Lighting Science – which uses special tuned lighting for applications such as water purification, turtle protection and space use – is developing a tuned light trap for the yellow fever mosquito. The company is already working with the US Department of Agriculture on its programme of light-based insect traps. With a little modification, it thinks it can develop one specially to help in the war on the Zika virus.

This is because different mosquitos are attracted to different wavelengths of light. By ‘tuning’ the light specifically at the yellow fever mosquito – or Aedes aegypti, to give it its scientific name – the light traps can be targeted.

‘There’s no one size fits all,’ Maxik told Fortune magazine this week. By testing the traps in the field, the company can work out exactly which spectral signature attracts and which repels the creatures. Special lights can then be developed to deter the mosquitoes from approaching buildings such as ante-natal clinics and hospitals in high-risk zones. ‘We’re trying to create light that’s useful for our own purposes.’

LED lamps · led lighting · led tubes · Novel Energy Lighting · tunable light · zika virus

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