MIT develops high efficiency incandescent

[josh88]

Pretty interesting stuff, incandescent lamps that are more efficient than led.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...-MIT-makes-them-more-efficient-than-LEDs.html


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[robartsd]

It was interesting that the prototype has the fillament in a plane. It would be awesome if this develops in a way to become a drop in replacement for conventional halogen lamps - imagine what a high effiecency replacement for a 575W HPL could do for the low end of entertainment lighting.

The numbers in the article don't seem to be right which makes me wonder how much spin has been put into the article. There is a claim that the best LED and florescent lamps only achive a CRI of 80 - I'm pretty sure the best are in the 90's. The claim that basic incandescents waste 95% of energy as heat sounds right. That corresponds to 5% efficency. The same paragraph claims that LED and florescent lamps achieve about 14% efficency; however, I thought florescent is about 4 times and LED about 5 times as efficient as incandescent. No mention of the actual efficency of the prototype.

 

[josh88]

They are estimating it could be up to 40% efficient... but its just an estimate which sounds like they don't have enough data yet to be sure.

 

[robartsd]

They are estimating it could be up to 40% efficient... but its just an estimate which sounds like they don't have enough data yet to be sure.

Yeah, I saw that. I took that as this technology might be capable of, rather than this prototype might actually achieve.

 

[josh88]

Thats what I was thinking too. In either case I'm curious to see where this goes and what the options will look like a bunch of years down the road.

 

[Malabaristo]

The actual press release from MIT is slightly less hyperbolic: http://news.mit.edu/2016/nanophotonic-incandescent-light-bulbs-0111

As expected, the efficiency of the prototype is nowhere near their theoretical numbers (about 6.6%). Also, it sounds a lot like a minor improvement over existing (though not terribly common) technology: http://www.ushio.com/products/generallighting/hr-eurostarir12v.php

 

[JD]

Always nice to see progress being made, but I have a lot of doubts as to a practical product. The chief concern I would have is, "How does this lamp age?" I would have to thing that there would be tungsten transferred to the plates and a general degradation of the ability of this stack to work as designed. Once out of kilter, I think things would go downhill fast. Basically, a meltdown of the stack. We shall see....

 

[Ford]

Another concern from my viewpoint as a product developer would be that by filtering and reflecting the "unused" or "undesired" energy back into the device for recycling, you would actually be making this into a narrow band emitter, and eliminating the very think that we like in incandescent lighting... broad spectrum.

Time will tell!

 

[starksk]

Another concern from my viewpoint as a product developer would be that by filtering and reflecting the "unused" or "undesired" energy back into the device for recycling, you would actually be making this into a narrow band emitter, and eliminating the very think that we like in incandescent lighting... broad spectrum.

Time will tell!

I don't think it would make it too terribly narrow band. From the associated press releases, they are just reflecting back IR and allowing the visible spectrum to pass.

I do think it would be interesting if they were able to fine tune the technology to specific wavelengths to produce narrow(er) band emitters though. Essentially, they would be creating dichroic filters in the envelope that fed the unwanted energy back to the source to be reused just like the IR.