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Ideal street lamp

28.04.2013

A team of researchers from Taiwan and Mexico has developed an LED lantern that illuminates the street really perfectly: without shadow spots, with a minimum of light pollution and electricity consumption.

Street lights are a familiar element of the urban landscape, but they make a negative contribution to the environment: they create light pollution, consume a lot of energy, and in addition to all this, they illuminate the streets poorly - they leave unlit areas on the roads and streets. The latest advances in LED lighting have largely solved the problems of energy efficiency, but still a significant part of the light from street lamps does not go where it should. Light pollution problems exist in all large cities: night light interferes with birds, insects, plants, shines through bedroom windows and illuminates the stars, depriving us of the pleasure of admiring the starry sky.

The new LED system solves this problem. It provides uniform illumination of a specific section of the street at low energy costs. Usually street lights are placed in a checkerboard pattern along the streets and freeways. This limits the freedom to place the poles and also creates shadow patches that can only be avoided by installing more lanterns. The new lantern can be adjusted to any contour of the site, for example, it can illuminate only a rectangle of a road, a square of a parking lot, or any other surface shape. At the same time, the optical utilization factor (OUF, the ratio of the emitted light and the luminous flux on the object) of the new lamp reaches 51-81%. For comparison: in the best modern street lamps, OUF does not exceed 45%, that is, most of the light "flies" anywhere, and not to the desired object.

The main feature of the new flashlight is an unusual design. The luminaire consists of three LED clusters, each with a special total internal reflection (TIR) lens. This lens focuses light so that the beams are parallel to each other. This process is called collimation. These lenses send maximum light onto the subject, while an additional diffuser eliminates glare and further reduces light pollution. The combination of collimator and diffuser also allows you to customize the shape of the light spot, for example, for a freeway it will be a rectangle. These light rectangles are easy to connect to perfectly illuminate the road: without dark areas and glare.

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