What is LED light and How do Led Lamps work?

LED

LAMPS WITH LEDS DIODES

Lamps or bulbs with LEDs, which give a pleasant white light, consume little amount of energy and last for many years. These features are attracting more and more people every day, making the Incandescent lamps almost obsolete.

Popular wisdom says that the lamps melt because no manufacturer would be interested in selling an eternal bulb. I would sell it only once, of course. However, light bulbs are emerging that provide pure white lighting, do not get hot, consume twenty times less than an incandescent bulb, and last for years. Sooner or later, these bulbs created with LEDs will replace your old, inefficient Incandescent lamps.

Interior design is a slave to technology. When the plastics appeared, the houses were filled with bright orange furniture that, by the way, is back in fashion today. For its part, the small and intense halogen bulbs changed the shape of the lamps and made the installation of halogen bulbs embedded in the ceiling the first DIY task for the handyman.

What can we expect in the next few years when we press a switch? Smaller, brighter, and greener lamps. The future is called LED, and it is not that far.

Comparison of Normal Bulbs and Led Bulbs :

Before continuing, if you want to know how much energy an LED bulb produces compared to old fashioned bulbs, a 10w LED bulb provides the same amount of light as a normal 60w bulb and lasts longer. The 12w led bulbs would be equivalent to those of 75W.

More equivalences:

 - A 5w LED is equivalent to a 25w incandescent (normal filament bulbs).

 - A 15w Led is equivalent to a 100w incandescent one.

 - A 30w Led is equivalent to an incandescent 200w.

A lumen is a unit used to express the amount of light that a bulb is capable of generating. There is a formula that approximately tells us the lumens of the LED bulbs.

Real lumens = the number of watts x 70.

So you can compare a normal bulb (incandescent) of 60w produces between 700 and 800 lumens and one of 100w about 1,300 lumens.

  The average duration of a normal bulb is about 1,000 hours, running 3 hours a day. Whereas for LEDs, it is about 30,000 hours.

LED Light

How do Led Lamps work?

 When Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 it was not for his theory of relativity, but a seemingly more modest study: the photoelectric effect. Einstein described how some materials, when subjected to an electric current, emit light.

The light produced by the photoelectric effect has a certain frequency (that is, it is only one color), which depends on the type of material. There is also the opposite effect, which causes photovoltaic panels to produce electricity by exposing them to light.

LEDs have been known since the 60s. They are those red and green pilots that are in all electronic devices. Inside the plastic hood of an LED is a semiconductor material. When a small electric current is applied, when passing through the semiconductor it emits light, producing almost no heat and with a defined color.

The color can even be invisible to the human eye, like the infrared LEDs on the TV remote control.

 Depending on the semiconductor material light of one color or another will be emitted.

A matter of blue

 If the LEDs are so old, why have they not become popular by this time? The problem is precisely the color. Red and green diodes were very easy and cheap to produce, but blue ones were not. Everything changed in 1993 when researcher Shuji Nakamura discovered a cheaper manufacturing process with two compounds: Gallium Nitride and Indium Nitride, which are the ones used today.

To get white light you have to mix red, green and blue light equally. You can experiment with looking closely at a white part of the computer screen, and it will be verified that it is composed of tiny dots of these colors. When you walk away, you see the color white.

The discovery of the blue LEDs opened the door to home lighting, lighter computer screens and more spectacular disco lights, which can adopt any color and be controlled with a PC, and also to an avalanche of blue pilots in appliances and cars " tuned. "

Advantages of LEDs

- Size: at the same brightness, an LED occupies less space than an incandescent bulb.

- Luminosity: LEDs are comparatively brighter, and also, the light is not concentrated at one point (such as the filament of the bulb) but the entire diode shines equally.

- Duration: a LED can last 50,000 hours, or what is the same, six years on constantly. That is 50 times more than an incandescent bulb.

- Consumption: a traffic light that replaces the bulbs with LEDs will consume 10 times less with the same brightness.

If they are in development then, why are LED bulbs already sold in lighting stores even with all their advantages if they are not yet ready to reach the average consumer? The white light LEDs are blue diodes with a phosphor coating that produces yellow light. The sum of yellow and blue produces a whitish light sometimes called "moonlight" which is used in LED flashlights.

These types of LEDs are still expensive. The 10W LED bulbs, which can replace a 60W bulb, cost around 10 euros. The savings in consumption and duration are not enough reasons for consumers to launch for them.

This is not the case in other applications where duration and consumption are important factors, such as traffic lights, aircraft lighting or flashlights used in risky sports (such as high mountains, caving and others), where this technology has found, for the moment, one of its main markets.

Advances occur at full speed and an LED lamp with the same features can decrease in price in a matter of months.

Ibáñez suffers the consequences of this speed. "You can't have stock. Next year, the same lamp will cost half and will light twice. Yes, in five years, the rest will disappear. The incandescent bulb will be used only as something romantic."

Finally, we want to leave you a link so that you can see what you can get with the diodes, in this case for the construction of the super-thin screens of the TVs, such as LED TVs and the latest in OLED TVs.

Here you have a fantastic video that explains the new Led lighting, how it works, advantages and uses: