Currently, LED light fittings are still in the early stage of development. Although LED lighting products have entered the industrial area, commercial area and residential area, the immature technologies still need further development, like output power, luminous flux, secondary optical design, cooling and other problems. Among them, cooling problem is the biggest difficulty for LED manufacturers. Limited by LED working principles, all structure accessories of LED lamps should have good cooling effects (good thermal conductivity) on the basis of safety. If using plastic materials, LED light fittings will soften and begin to melt within a few hours. Therefore, LED makers have restricted requirements on the LED light source structure designs and materials selection.
The commonly used cooling material in the market is aluminum/aluminum alloy. As a result of high costs (selling prices), some makers stated to find cheaper replacements with good thermal conductivity as well. Then PC covered LED lamps started to appear in the market. PC raw materials were firstly used as fixtures during the design for kitchen lights committed by Bayer Germany. They are durable and also have good thermal conductivity. The most important thing is that they are cheap.
Compared with traditional lamps, LED light fittings distinguish in many aspects: different deterioration speed in lamp bead (in high temperature, under high/low voltage); Electrical control. LED lights need to work under direct current; structure design, material selection, appearance design need corresponding variations. Insolated circuits/protections should be applied to guarantee the independent operation of LED light source and lamp body.
Many insiders indicated that, the main reason for LED light fittings hardly to be accepted by ordinary families is their expensive selling prices, which is caused by their high production costs. The light-emitting principle determines the cost of the product. The production cost of LED lamps is two times higher than traditional lights. Specifically: the over-expensive production costs of light source; restricted requirements to package structures and materials increase the production cost by nearly 50%. Semiconductor light emitting components are generally more expensive than traditional light emitting components. Due to lacking of core technology, the majority of our LED chips need to import from foreign companies. However, the production cost of LED chips occupied more than 60% total cost of the entire lighting fixture. The profit that China’s LED manufacturers obtained is rather limited.