Excitement in the general lighting industry over the potential of high-power LEDs is creating a bonanza for electronics component suppliers in the UK.
So much so, that firms which previously only operated in a narrow segment of the market are now producing complete lighting assemblies.
Milton Keynes-based thermal management firm Universal Science is an example. Formerly only designing and supplying special PCBs and heat sinks for automotive and industrial customers, the companies portfolio has broadened. “We now build complete light engines,” technical manager Arthur Harrison told Electronics Weekly.
Light engine is fast becoming the accepted term for a complete assembly of LED, heatsink and optics that a lighting firm can fit directly into a luminair - a light fitting - that a lighting installation firm can work with.
The light engine can include all the electronics required to allow the luminair to function from a standard 240V or 12V ‘halogen’ transformer.
Lumidrives is another firm which it branching out. Initially it made power supplies to control LED lighting, including those which control the colour of RGB light sources over data busses.
Now it is producing complete downlighter assemblies, dubbed HaloLED16, and has started its own subsidiary, L2 optics, to design and make the beam-forming collimators needed to efficiently extract light from LEDs.
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Lumileds' hexagonal 'Star' footprint has become something
of a de-facto standard in the LED lighting industry.
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Downlighters, usually occupied by a single 20 or 50W halogen bulb and frequently called MR16 fittings, are where much of the action is.
It was noticed several years ago that a luminair containing three high-power LEDs, their associated optics, heatsink and power supply can be fitted into the same hole that a downlighter clips into.
Optics suppliers including Slough-based Carclo, L2 and Italy’s Fraen produce holders which accommodate three of their collimators in a downlighter-compatible diameter.
The availability of ready-designed optics, particularly in a format that gives an RGB option, is one contributor to the growth of light engine suppliers. Another is the production of appropriate triple-LED thermal PCBs from firms including Universal Scientific - two years ago, poor thermal design from ignorant luminair makers led to unreliable designs which were threatening the fledgling LED lighting industry.
Cumbria-based Marl International, which has been supplying custom LEDs for years, has just announced a complete ready-to-fit downlighter called Aztec16. “Aztec16 has been developed in response to demands from the lighting industry for a workhorse lighting product that has the flexibility to address a broad spectrum of applications,” said the firm.
In this fitting, Marl has bucked the three-LED trend and used a single collimator over one multi-die LED from Lamina. The multiple die can be all the same colour or a mixture, allowing colour-change luminairs to be made.
Light output and readability
Architects and lighting designers are having to get used to the different characteristics of light from LEDs - either white or RGB clusters.
"All current lighting standards are design around tungsten and fluorescent sources and are based around photoscopic [eye weighted] measurements," Dennis Lockwood, managing director of Mansfield-based Whiteley Electronics told EW.
"But photoscopic response at lower levels is different. Text illuminated by a 100lux SON [high pressure sodium floodlight] is less readable than with a 40lux LED, there is a big difference."
Whiteley makes LED street lights and luminairs used high up in warehouses.
Lockwood reckons that 100 lumens-worth of tungsten light can be replaced by 20 lumens of LED light in many cases.
Carclo Optics
L2 Optics
Lumidrives
Marl
Photonics Cluster
Universal Science
Whiteley Electronics