The ‘Let there be light’ applications of 2013
John Lewis wins Retail Project of the Year
As Xmas bears down us all at a frightening pace one of the best places to ‘shop til you drop’ in the UK will be The John Lewis Ipswich store, which incorporates GE Lighting’s LEDs, and won ‘Retail Project of the Year’ at the LUX Awards 2013.
The John Lewis Partnership’s Ipswich store is the company’s first 100 percent LED store. The LUX Awardsjudges said the project gave a glimpse of "the future of retail lighting, and showed how to use LEDs without the slightest compromise to the lit environment".
The decision for John Lewis to move to energy efficient LED technology was motivated by its CSR goal to reduce energy consumption in its stores by 20 percent in 10 years. The retail brand opted for luminaires supplied and adapted by Edge Lighting, incorporating GE Lighting’s Infusion LED modules throughout the store. The lighting scheme is delivering significant energy savings and enhancing the retail experience for customers.
"The biggest thing for retailers is having the confidence to convert to LEDs," explained Barry Ayling, Lighting Design Manager at John Lewis. "Five years ago there were lots of LED expectations that weren’t met and even only eighteen months ago, the cost of LEDs was still very prohibitive."
When it came to installing LEDs in the new Ipswich store, John Lewis had very specific criteria for the lighting scheme. This included a colour temperature requirement of 3000K warm white combined with precise light control via a 15-degree narrow beam optical system. Furthermore, since LED technology continues to evolve, the new lighting scheme in the John Lewis store had to be easy to upgrade in the future.
The solution.
More about the store at John Lewis Ipswich
Shedding some light on Buenos Aires with LED technology
The city of Buenos Aires in Argentina selected Philips to renew the city’s street lighting system with LED technology. Philips will replace the majority of the 125,000 existing street lights with new LED luminaires under a 3-year term contract.
Philips was awarded the contract as a result of a public bidding process and up to 91,000 street lights will be replaced with LED technology (including luminaires on avenues, streets, and parks).
Philips’ LED-based lighting will enable energy savings for more than 50% for the city. The Philips solution offers a lifetime that is five times longer than conventional lighting and reduce the environmental impact of the lighting system and reduce maintenance costs for the city of Buenos Aires.
More about the application in Buenos Aires
LED lighting illuminates the art of the Sistine Chapel
Osram equipped the Sistine Chapel in Rome with a new type of LED solution. After 500 years, the historic artworks can now be viewed to a level of precision not previously available. In addition, 60% less power is consumed compared to the existing lighting installation.
"Art presents the most demanding requirements on light. Following the globally unique lighting solution in the Lenbachhaus Museum in Munich, the world-renowned frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are now being subjected to the same extremely high lighting specifications, once again underlining the authority of Osram as integrated lighting expert operating in accordance with maximum specifications," explained Peter Laier, Osram’s Chief Technology Officer and executive board member responsible for the company’s general lighting business.
Around 7,000 LEDs will homogeneously illuminate the Sistine Chapel from next year onwards, enabling the world-famous works of art to be shown to greatest effect. The colour spectrum was custom-adapted on a scientific basis and with high precision to the colour pigments of the paintings, for example to the pigments in the Michelangelo frescoes. The precise guiding of light ensures that the art is uniformly illuminated, and without glare for visitors. The luminaires are to be installed away from view below the windows to make sure that light is emitted in the same direction as the natural daylight. Until now, the art could only be seen insufficiently and according to the ingress of daylight, and limited by technological and conservational constraints.
The need for conservation played an important role during the planning of the project, and the new LED solution is gentler and more caring than all alternative artificial forms of light. Illuminance of approximately 50 to 100 lux (previously 5 to 10 lux) ensures that the art can be clearly discerned, but with as little aging as possible.
In addition to the quality of the lighting, the new solution is also more economic than the previous system. Although the level of illuminance could be increased many times over, power consumption for the lighting in the Sistine Chapel is expected to be reduced by more than 60%. The reason for this is not only the implementation of energy-saving LEDs but also the highly exact light planning that illuminates the chapel with high precision and completely without light spill.
This pilot project, with the working title of LED4Art, is subsidised by the European Subsidy Program for Information and Communication Technology within the Framework Program on Competitiveness and Innovation (PSP-CIP).
LED based luminous ceiling simulates daylight to soothe intensive care patients
Philips developed a media enabled LED based luminous ceiling that can simulate energizing daylight to comfort critically ill patients.
The LED based ceiling has been introduced into clinical use by the Charité Campus Virchow Clinic in Berlin as part of a stress-reducing concept called ‘Parametric Spatial Design’. Hospital staff can enter the desired parameters and the large, sky like area creates visuals and light moods customized to the situation of individual patients, enabled by software from ART+COM. The Clinic has implemented the concept in two of its intensive care patient rooms to enhance the healing environment for patients who are severely ill.
Research shows that most people will at least once in their life be treated in an Intensive Care Unit. In many cases the patients’ lives are at risk as they await an operation or start to recover after surgery. In this critical phase they often find their surroundings irritating and hostile. Clinical research has shown that factors like loud noise, inappropriate lighting conditions and social isolation can increase the risk of patients in intensive care slipping into a shock-like state.
The first prototype is now in clinical use. In the new intensive care rooms at the Charité Clinic the medical apparatus has been hidden from view and the level of noise has been reduced. The innovative LED luminous ceiling from Philips adapts to suit the patient’s specific wishes: the doctor in charge of the patient’s care enters a number of parameters relating to the patient’s wellbeing on a tablet PC. A program specially designed by ART+COM controls the screen in such a way that the light is tailored to suit the patient’s needs and an appropriate mood is created in the patient room. Amongst other things, live weather updates from the German meteorological office are used to support this process.
More about the application at the Charité Campus Virchow Clinic
LED technology helps Space Shuttle Atlantis to ‘fly’ again
The Kennedy Space Center became the first museum to display a space shuttle in full flight mode by using an LED lighting solution from Lumenpulse.
Suspending the space shuttle Atlantis 30 feet in the air, the museum’s new exhibit uses advanced lighting techniques to reveal the orbiter as it would appear in space.
Designed by lighting design firm Fisher Marantz Stone, the museum’s lighting scheme used more than 250 Lumenpulse fixtures, which can be varied in color temperature and hue to recreate the unusual lighting conditions in outer space.
"Form factor and flexibility were essential to this project, and the Lumenpulse fixtures were a perfect fit, particularly since they offered tighter distribution options in high-wattage, high-lumen packages," said Paula Martinez-Nobles, Project Manager at Fisher Marantz Stone.
NASA is already well acquainted with LED technology: tunable, dynamic white technology is used to regulate the sleeping patterns of astronauts. In fact, the
Kennedy Space Center had pushed for the use of LED when it came time to illuminate the shuttle.
"The Space Center wanted to ensure reliability and simplify maintenance issues – they didn’t want to crawl above the orbiter to change light bulbs every few months – so using LED fixtures was a requirement," explained Martinez-Nobles.
More about the application at the Kennedy Space Center
LEDs set highlights in car interiors
Across all segments of the automotive market, manufacturers are seeing increased demand for innovative interior lighting solutions. Supplier Hella KGaA, a tier one supplier dedicated to lighting technology, has completed a number of design-ins this year with several OEMs. To meet the increasing demand for highly customizable designs, the company has devised a spectrum of options from elongated light guides to diffuse lighting for footwell and map pockets.
In the luxurious Range Rover SUV, available since 2012, customers can chose their ambient lighting from a particularly ample option list. Future car owners have the choice of ten different colours, from "Spark Blue" to "Racing Red", plus, of course, White. To create the desired impression, Hella utilized light guides, integrated in the map pockets of the doors as well as in the centre console. They obtain their light from a total of eight RGB modules, each incorporating three different LEDs for red, green and blue light. A control node at the LIN bus blends these three basic colours to obtain the desired light colour. In addition, the LIN module also controls the brightness. As a part of the production process, the LEDs are selected in groups that match in terms of brightness as well as of colour. After the LEDs are surveyed, a correcting matrix is generated for each LED chip to guarantee a uniform, even colour impression.
The Seat Leon – Seat’s companion to the Golf from parent company Volkswagen – also utilized lighting solutions from Hella. Seat’s engineers integrated an indirect illumination in the door panel. A bi-colour LED module enables interior lighting according to the selected driving profile – white in the comfort and eco mode, red in the sport mode. Since the light is fed into the light conductors from both ends, the light impression is particularly homogeneous.
Adam, the new subcompact from Opel / Vauxhall, also offered an unusual wide range of interior lighting choices. The MultiColor LED lighting option available for this vehicle can generate eight different colours. The centre console then is illuminated in the colour selected, as well as the passenger footwell and the map pockets in the doors.
An innovative detail is the optional backlighting of the glove compartment lid which creates the impression of a luminous stardust. Integrated in the canopy is a LED-generated starry sky. Both are controlled by the Ambient Light Control Module (ALCM) developed by Hella. What makes this control unit special is that it works completely independent of the vehicle’s central ECU.
More about the applications in the automotive market
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