The new bay bridge in San Francisco is under construction, and expected to be open to traffic before the end of 2013. Last Thursday night, the new bay bridge bathed in radiant white light, attracting a lot of travelers and passengers stopped to watch from afar. The soft and bright light was provided by the thousands of LED lamps installed on the bridge. “Since LED is a kind of one-direction lighting source, the light generated by them is more soft, without any infrared and ultraviolet rays or flickers. ” Said Mr. Shelly, one member of the design group, “Another reason for using LED bridge lighting is that they can effectively reduce the traffic accident rate because of lacking of glares.” Electrical contractor Bleyco is responsible for the lighting part of this $7 billion project. They joint up with famous lighting producer Musco and applied the most advanced bridge lighting system in history.
The initial design concept was to use advanced directional lighting technology to provide carriageway solid white rays for drivers. In this way, glares on zebra crossings and windshields can be eliminated to a large extent. In 2008, it was the first time that Bleyco had contacted with Musco. But, unfortunately, such lighting technology has not been developed at that moment. Not until the end of 2009, Musco put forwards a LED lighting plan, which was proved feasible and received positive responds from Bleyco. But in 2009, Musco was still lack of core technology to control multiple LED lamps by one chip. They conducted a series of experiments on 25-50 pieces Cree XM-L LED street lights built on one country road in Ohio. The LED bridge lighting system of new bay bridge is very special: each lamp pointed to different directions, with different “cap” and different lens, equipped with several layers of metal plates at the top, sandwiched between nylon to suppress the vibration. The pentagonal shape design matched up with the central tower of the bridge, seven fixtures on each pole represented the seven pillars on the central tower. Not only that the entire lighting system has long service life but also it is safer and more beautiful.