With the enhancement of people’s awareness of environmental protection, the lighting industry paid more and more attention on energy consuming problems. In accordance with related statistics, in the process of energy consuming, more than 20% electricity is used for lighting. Improving the lighting efficiency to furthermore reduce the energy consumption became an impending issue. Therefore, high-efficiency LED area lighting has been put forward as a hot topic.
In the view of application areas, lighting include residential lighting, industrial lighting, street lighting, restaurant and hotel lighting, retails and service lighting. In the view of power consuming, lighting also can be divided as low-power lighting high-power lighting. Typical high-power LED area lighting applications include LED bollard lamps, LED wall washer lamps, LED tunnel lights, LED street lights, LED public security lamps, LED high bay lights and so on. All these are outdoor area lighting applications. Indoor LED area lighting applications include low ceiling lights, high ceiling lights, LED garage lighting, etc.
High-power LED area lighting products have many challenges: continuous working in high temperatures aggravates the light attenuation; Safety problems caused by the failure of lighting sources; design challenges in hostile environments, etc. The exiting lighting sources for high-power area lighting applications are metal halide lamps, high pressure sodium lamps, linear fluorescent lamps and compact fluorescent lamps. It is noticed that all of these lighting sources have their defects. High pressure sodium lamps have very poor CRI (only 22). Metal halide lamps have much lower lighting efficiency (only 40%). Linear fluorescent lamps have poor cold temperature performance and compact fluorescent lamps have long staring time.
On the other hand, with the continuous improvement of performance and production costs of high-brightness White Ray LED technology, it started to be widely used in the LED area lighting industry. Compared with traditional lighting sources, White Ray LED lights have higher light efficiency (can emit more light per Watt), have higher CRI, have better direction control capability, more environmental friendly and can be easily handled in the starting/shutting process. Intelligent technique also can be utilized in LED area lighting area. Brightness can be controlled automatically by central computers embedded within LED lamps through external mounted sensors.
In addition, LEDs are more reliable, which will help reduce operation and maintenance costs.