标签：LED down lamps

Future development of LED down lamps

With the development of LED down lighting technology, a large number of LED manufacturers realized the importance of product quality. Only high quality LED lighting products can impress customers and make them decide to replace their old traditional lighting applications with LED lamps.

 

With the development of LED down lighting technology, a large number of LED manufacturers realized the importance of product quality.

 

It is the quality that determines the future direction of LED down lamps. In fact, LED lighting industry is suffering bottleneck currently. The over-expensive production cost made them be hardly accepted by ordinal buyers. Compared with traditional fluorescent lights, which is only cost several USD, LED down lamps are incomparable. Experts believed that in order to successfully break this bottleneck, LED manufacturers should improve the quality of LED products, prolong the service life to more than 50,000 hours. In addition, they also need to spend more energy and time on the appearance design.

 

Thank to their own advantages, designers will have more creative space if they choose to use LED lighting products instead of traditional lamps. That is the main reason that more and more interior designers would like to use LED down lamps, which break the traditional concepts of appearance. The energy-saving and low heat dissipation features make LED down lights also can be used in the commercial and industrial areas.

 

With the increasingly popularization of LED lighting technologies, a large number of inferior LED down lamps flooded into the market, the instable quality of them broke the expectations of buyers towards LED down lights, even exerted bad influences on other LED lighting products. Because of the lacking of a unified standard in the LED lighting industry, consumers usually felt helpless when they bought some low-quality products but found nowhere to complain. All these casted a thick layer of shadow on the future of the lighting industry. The majority of small and media sized LED makers either to sink in the pessimistic ocean or to struggle to survive under the huge pressure. The time will give out the final result.

 

What LED makers needed desperately right now is a unified standard. They should not pursuit the immediate petty profits at the cost of the overall development of the LED down lighting products. LED down lights have a bright future, but LED manufacturers have to aim high and learn from mistakes that they made before.

Compartments that determine the lifetime of LED down lamps

There are three compartments of LED down lamps that can determine their lifetime: LED beads (LED chips car led ), LED power supplies (LED drivers), cooling sections. LED beads are the core part of LED down lamps, which will directly determine their performances and service lives. Currently, most high quality LED beads are from Cree (American) and Nichia (Japan). Other LED chip manufacturers with higher cost performances are Epistar, Everlight from Taiwan and Sanan optoelectronics, Yingrui from the mainland.

 

Compartments that determine the lifetime of LED down lamps

 

Undoubtedly, Cree is the best LED chip manufacturers in the world, LED lights used these beads have higher output luminous flux, longer service life, but also higher selling prices. These products are more suitable for European and American markets. Chips from Taiwan are weaker than Cree chips in performances, but still have very long lifetime, can be afforded by customers from developing countries and regions, like the mainland, Southeast Asia and Mid-east.

 

LED power supplies are the heart of LED down lamps, having significant influences on them. LED down lights usually work under 110-220VAC. Since the development of LED lights is relatively shorter than other traditional lamps, the Chinese Government still has no uniformed standard for LED power supplies. Currently, LED power supplies that sold in domestic market have different qualities, different standards, many of which have very low power factor (PF) and cannot pass the EMC electrical tests. The lifetime of electrolytic capacitors within power supplies are directly determine the lifetime them. In order to reduce the cost as low as possible, producers tend to use low quality electrolytic capacitors, which will weak the efficiency of power supplies, making “long lifetime” LED down lamps become “short life” lights.

 

The cooling design of LED down lights also impacts their lifetime magnificently. Heat generated by LED beads will be conducted to PCBs and finally covers, then dissipated into the air though covers. Among these parts, it is the PCBs’ heat dissipation performances that determine the quality of cooling sections. PCB must have a higher thermal conductivity. The thermal conductivity of grease should be good enough. The cooling area of the enclosure should be large enough. Reasonable design of these parts can maintain the working temperature of PN junctions under 70 degrees, which can guarantee the normal working conditions of LED down lights.

General analysis of LED down lamps’ current situation

Recently, China’s National Development and Reform Commission released an announcement: “Plans for phasing out incandescent lights in China”. According to this announcement, from 1st October of 2012, incandescent lights with power consumptions higher than 100W will be banned in the mainland. And from 1st October of 2012, incandescent lights with power consumptions higher than 15W will be banned in the mainland. That means the ordinary incandescent lighting applications will leave the stage of the lighting history. As the most advanced lighting technology today, LED lights has emerged in the market and been known by customers.

 

Recently, China’s National Development and Reform Commission released an announcement

 

Since the invention of LED lights, their brightness has constantly and stably upgraded (from LED indicators to intelligent LED street lights), implying that LED lights will become the dominated lighting applications on day. Similarly, LED down lamps also transformed from the high-en lighting products to the new darling of general application market.

 

Down lights is a type of indoor lighting applications, which can be used in shopping malls, offices, factories, hospitals and also houses. LED down lamps inherits all the advantages of traditional down lights, besides they also have typical features of LED lighting technologies: less heat dissipation, save more energy, can work for a long time, small costs of maintenance and replacement. In the early stage of development, because of the over-expensive of LED chips, LED down lamps were hardly accepted by end users. However, the reduction of LED chip prices and together with the improvement of cooling section designs made it is possible for LED down lights to seize the commercial lighting market.

 

LED chips, lamp covers and drivers (power supplies) compose the main body of LED down lights. single LED chips with high power are more suitable for LED down lighting applications. Low-powered LED chips, like 5050, 5630 are more suitable for LED panels, since they cannot provide sufficient light when used individually. The normal distance from lamp bodies to the ground for indoor lighting products is around 4-5 meters. Definitely, only high-powered single LED chip can meet such requirements. The most common used high-power LED chip for LED down lights is 1W LED chip, which can be used to make 1W, 3W, 5W, 7W and 9W (25W tops) LED down lights.