LED lamps and luminaires are commonly available in 2700K, 3000K and 4000K colour temperatures, but how do you go about choosing the correct colour?

This question has been answered by Chris Shenton, technical and quality specialist at LEDvance UK.

Lamp colour temperature is often a personal or historical choice and it depends on what environment is being created.

Here is a general guide:

2700K is a similar colour appearance to incandescent lamps and is a warm, relaxing colour.

3000K is a similar colour appearance to halogen lamps with a warm but crisper colour than 2700K. Commonly called ‘warm white’.

4000K is a cooler, whiter colour than 2700K and 3000K. It’s the lamp that has traditionally been used in offices, waiting areas and most commercial applications. This is commonly called ‘cool white’,  or occasionally ‘neutral white’.

6500K is a very cool white that is used to simulate day light. It is also said to increase productivity when used in a work environment. It is commonly referred to as ‘daylight’.

The warmer colours work well in more relaxed environments with warmer colour decoration such as in domestic living rooms, restaurants and hospitality areas.

The cooler colours work well to help create a lively environment with lighter colour decoration such as domestic kitchens, offices, warehousing and in retail spaces.

Now that we have the ability for colour ‘tuning’ via LED sources, the extremes of warm and cold white sources are being used as the basis for ‘human centric’ lighting installations. Mixing of the two extremes allows interior lighting schemes to be adjusted according to the needs of the occupants.

See our range of LED lamps and luminaires here: www.novelenergylighting.com

Retail is dependent on turnover. And, of course, profit, in the end. Whether it be food or non-food – the level of financial success is largely dependent on the type of lighting. And in a quite different way.

In retail, lighting represents a considerable cost factor: in the food trade, this is 25 % of the total energy costs. In the non food trade, lighting represents more than 60 % of the energy costs and is the highest cost factor! This is often combined with high maintenance costs. Using modern light and well thought out lighting solutions, individually adapted to the individual shop scenario, you can realise significant potential saving.

Three brands – one aim: perfect lighting. For every situation. Together with its subsidiaries Siteco and Traxon, OSRAM offers high quality flexible and pioneering lighting solutions and products. The portfolios supplement each other perfectly in shop lighting. The result: innovative, decorative and attractive light, enormously versatile and variable, highly efficient and thereby cost-reducing. From precise point accent lighting and homogeneous general lighting, via pioneering lighting control systems, to dynamic LED effect lighting.

 

Visit www.novelenergylighting.com today to explore what Osram can do for you. We can provide light plans and project quotations for your LED retrofit project. Tel: 0208-540-8287

The power consumption benefits from LED street lighting could be compromised by the threat of voltage peaks from lightning strikes.

Lux Reports: ROME – If you’ve been to the Sistine Chapel, you probably recall the crick in your neck and the strain on your eyes as you gazed upwards to spot Michelangelo’s ceiling.

Strain no more.

The Vatican will today officially switch on 50 new luminaires containing 7,000 LEDs that illuminate masterpieces such as The Creation of Adam and The Last Judgement in a way that brings the paintings and frescoes into full, clear and colourful view, as was evident at a press preview last night.

‘We want to honour the 450th anniversary of Michelangelo’s death by providing new lighting for his work,’ said Prof Antonio Paolucci, director of the Vatican Museums.

The great artist would probably be proud of the project, led by Germany’s Osram, which said the new LEDs provide ten times the brightness of previous lighting, while slashing energy consumption by 90 percent.

What was the most difficult aspect of the two-year job? ‘To prove that the light was not harmful for the art,’ said Martin Reuter, senior technical project manager at Osram, speaking to Lux at the event.

In order to be kindler and gentler to the paintings, the company did not use phosphor-coated white light, but instead used of a mix of blue, red and green LEDs. Osram sent original pigments for the ceiling, which Michelangelo completed in 1512, to Hungary’s Pannonian Univeristy for testing. Pannonian gave the all-clear after a year.

Other partners included Barcelona’s Instituit de Recerca en Energia, which investigated the energy reductions, and Rome-based lighting designer Faber Technica.

The European Commission helped fund the partners (the money did not go straight to the Vatican, as the Vatican is not part of the EU). The parties have not revealed the cost of the project. But the results speak for themselves, as the photo above shows.

Novel Energy Lighting has provided LED lighting for many churches here in the UK – contact us for details for your upgrade to LED, to save up to 90% energy

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Optics in the classic bulb-shaped lamps in the new OSRAM LED portfolio have been designed to largely exclude irregularities such as dark shadow lines in the far field light and to achieve homogeneous light distribution, achieved by the particular form of the plastic optic, developed specifically for the new lamp generation.

The optic design was challenging due to the high technical and aesthetic demands, and was developed with the aid of in-house programmed software. Optics in the new OSRAM LED classic portfolio radiate at angles of up to 300° and are based on a uniform optical concept across all lamp types.

This achieves a uniform design appearance, and also shorter development periods and lower costs because the optics of various lamp types are compatible with identical mechanical components. This modular construction principle has been consistently applied by OSRAM to all components in its new LED lamp portfolio.

Visit novelenergylighting.com for all your LED needs. We sell a range of Osram LED and others.

From domestic households and the catering sector to industrial applications – light emitting diodes (LED) are becoming ever more popular, because high quality LEDs in particular from renowned manufacturers such as the lighting expert Osram feature significant benefits compared to standard light sources.

They feature good colour rendering, high energy efficiency and durability, consequently reducing running costs such as power overheads or replacement costs.

The structure and principal of LEDs

Light emitting diodes consist of several layers of semiconductor material that generate light upon the application of DC voltage. In contrast to incandescent lamps an LED is a monochromatic light source, and according to its composition emits light with a specific colour. White-emitting LEDs also initially generate monochromatic light that must then be converted, and this is usually achieved with a combination of blue LEDs with a yellowish phosphor layer or by mixing the light of red, green and blue LEDs (RGB). Furthermore, specific RGB colours can be mixed to create an infinite number of colour tones by varying the mixing ratios. 

PET PCBs for greater flexibility

Typical LED modules consist of several combined LEDs, a fixed PCB and various other components. A practical alternative to fixed fibreglass PCBs are flexible materials based on polymers, as these enable the production of LED modules with a high diversity of forms, in turn opening the way to new designs and lighting solutions. Flexible light engines can also be manufactured on rolls, providing simpler handling as well as automatic manufacturing and the reduction of stock keeping overheads.

A robust, non-conductive material with a high optical reflection factor is ideal for producing such flexible PCBs, and the material should also be environmentally compatible and chemically stable. Such requirements are best fulfilled with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) versions. With regard to these advantages, the lighting manufacturer Osram developed its PrevaLED Flex Linear light engine that fully exploits the benefits of flexible PET PCBs. The light engine consists of a thin and pliable copper layer in which the requisite circuit has been etched and sealed between two PET layers. 

An efficient direct current solution

Due to the electrical properties of LEDs, their drivers should directly supply a constant current to the module. The reason for this is that in contrast to LED systems requiring constant voltage, other current control components on the module are not needed with systems supplied by constant current directly from the LED driver. This provides efficiency increases of 5 to 15 per cent. A sophisticated system for grouping and mixing the various LEDs (various bins) is used to achieve homogeneous voltage distribution in the LED lines various (also switched in parallel) with simultaneous constant current operation, thereby also avoiding brightness and colour deviations within the partly long and flexible systems. This in turn enables a uniform distribution of light colour and brightness, across each section and the complete module.

Light on a strip

In addition to flexibility, a special benefit of the strip solution is cutting the strip to suit the desired length, enabled by switching the LEDs in parallel. With the Osram PrevaLED for example, the strip can be cut after each segment without the module forfeiting any quality of light. One segment has a length of either 93.3 mm equipped with 10 LEDs or 140 mm with 12 LEDs, and the length itself is restricted merely by the supply of current, which must be as homogeneous as possible for all LEDs to create light with high uniformity. In this regard the distance between the current source and the LED is an important factor – the maximal length of a flexible LED module with single-sided power input is currently 1.5 metres, and module lengths of three metres can be achieved with central power input. As a consequence, the length of the light strip can be individually modified between approximately 10 cm and three metres, and installations that previously required the back-to-back switching of several modules can now be produced as one unit. 

PrevaLED also cuts installation costs by up to 30% compared to standard lighting solutions. The LED strip can be bonded simply into luminaires or luminous elements, enabling the saving of valuable work time. The broad flexibility of PrevaLED comes to the fore during simple installation and the implementation of sophisticated design projects, and the PET strip can for example be bent to form a circle with a radius of just 15 cm. With a colour temperature of 4000 Kelvin, a good colour rendering index of over 80 and up to 170 lumens per watt, PrevaLED Flex is not only a genuine alternative to fluorescent tubes but also opens up new possibilities for designing light.

PrevaLED Flex module. The flexible LED strip can be cut-to-suit after each segment to achieve precisely the required length.

New designs can be simply implemented with flexible PrevaLED Flex modules.

Light with savings potential

With regard to power consumption, the emission of greenhouse gases and maintenance costs, LEDs from quality suppliers such as Osram offer high potential for savings without any sacrifices in terms of light quality. If the significantly longer lifespans are also considered, the total calculation is distinctly positive. When upgrading to LEDs, power costs according to the specific system solution can be cut by up to 80%. Incandescent lamps in this regard are characterised by an efficiency of around 10 lm/W, halogen lamps have approximately 20 lm/W and fluorescent sources have 70 to 90 lm/W. Comparable white LEDs achieve an efficiency of between 70 and 100 lumens per watt according to type and light colour, with LED power consumption (according to type) being merely 0.1 to 15 watts. This means that even highly compact LEDs provide powerful lighting.

It’s a question of quality

In order to exploit the complete spectrum of advantages inherent in LED technology, when selecting the appropriate light source this mainly concerns the quality of components. The light source manufacturer Osram has upgraded its portfolio, helping consumers to more simply identify high quality LEDs at a glance, and will present its largest LED lamp spectrum until now in the Autumn of 2014. More than 90 LED lamp types will be available in the retail market with easy to recognise, uniform designs, and the consistent look of the popular candle, drop-shaped and mainly pear-shaped classic LED lamps will be characterised primarily by their smooth, white heat sinks. The uniform designs of the Osram lamps go beyond similar appearances to also provide a highly practical aspect – all lamps are based on identical modules used in different lamps.

Retrofit lamps are especially suitable for refurbishing classic lighting systems to energy efficient and durable LED technology. An example are lamps from the Osram Classic A40 series, featuring construction sizes and bases identical to classic incandescent lamps to enable easy replacement.

Light without shadowing

Decisive for the success of a lighting technology is whether the light from a lamp is perceived as being pleasant. This in turn depends on various factors, for example colour temperature and luminous intensity. The distribution of luminous intensity in the so-called far field is also important, meaning where light hits walls, floors or table surfaces for example. Of special importance in this respect is that light is distributed homogeneously and that minimum shadowing or linear structures are seen. The optics within LED lamps are responsible for this task. Because such optics can be seen from the outside with clear lamps, these are not only a functional element but must also be visually attractive. The optic also ensures that the “technology” of the lamp, meaning its LEDs and electronics, cannot be seen from the outside. 

Optics in the classic bulb-shaped lamps in the new Osram LED portfolio have been designed to largely exclude irregularities such as dark shadow lines in far field light and to achieve homogeneous light distribution, and this is achieved by the particular form of the plastic optic developed specifically for the new lamp generation. The design of the optic was developed with the aid of in-house programmed software due to these stringent technical and aesthetic requirements. Optics in the new Osram LED portfolio radiate at beam angles of up to 300° and also achieve a high level of uniformity in illumination. 

Retrofit lamp from the new Osram portfolio.

Highly diverse lighting solutions

In addition to high levels of efficiency, the inherent diversity of the compact diodes is also advantageous, ranging from applications for video walls in sports arenas to the illumination of refrigerators. Because of their specific properties such as low heat generation and flat constructions, LEDs can be used in locations where other luminaires may only be installed in compliance with strict conditions – such as in fire protection applications. LEDs also generate no infrared or ultraviolet radiation, making them ideal for use in foodstuff counters and hospitals, and thanks to their tough constructions, LEDs are the ideal light source for applications exposed to high loads such as in the automotive sector. Osram LEDs also achieve very good colour rendering values of up to Ra 95.

Novel Energy Lighting sells a range of Osram LED products. One of the more popular lamps is the Osram LED Star GU10 6.5W Dimmable.