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LED Lighting Technology

Hope you find this article on "LED Lighting Technology" written by our LED expert useful.
LED lighting technology is gaining ground significantly over incandescent and fluorescent lighting and the trend seems to be continuing to grow at a fast pace. The number of reasons why seem to be growing nearly as quickly.

LED Definition and History

LED, which stands for light emitting diode, is a semiconductor light source that was originally used as indicator devices in the early 1960s. When an LED is switched on, electrons re-combine with holes within the device, which releases energy in the form of photons. The effect is called electroluminescence and the color of the light is determined by the energy gap of the semiconductor which corresponds to the energy of the photon. Although early LEDs were primarily all low intensity red, they now cover the spectrum of colors and are very bright.

Advantages of LED Lighting Technology

There are many advantages of using LED lighting, even though the initial cost of purchase is higher than fluorescent or incandescent lighting. LED lighting is environmentally safe, great for outdoor lighting because they don’t attract bugs, are cool to the touch and produce less heat, don’t flicker, are smaller in size, provide a more direct and brighter light, are especially useful in hard to reach places, and are energy efficient so they save you money in the long term.

Energy Efficient LED Lighting Technology

LED lighting is more efficient than incandescent and halogen lights for several reasons. They last much longer than conventional lights (up to 100,000 hours), use much less energy, project light just where it’s needed instead of a more broad area, are very resilient, are ten times more efficient than fluorescent and forty times more than incandescent. Since they don’t produce much heat, it is possible to save money with cooling costs in the summer.

LED Lighting Technology is Environmentally Safe

LED lighting is environmentally safe for several reasons. LED lighting cuts energy costs, are free of harmful mercury, have lower greenhouse gas emissions, require less resources to manufacture – which all help to reduce the carbon footprint. Because LED lighting can last an average of seven to ten years, the future will see many less bulbs piling up in landfills across the nation. This alone is causing many people to switch from incandescent and fluorescent lighting to the long lasting LED lighting.

Advancements in LED Lighting Technology

Purdue University in Indiana recently announced their researchers have developed an alternate method of creating LED lights, one that relies on metal-coated silicon wafers instead of on a substrate of sapphire as they are currently. They state the use of silicon will allow industry manufacturers to make many devices on large wafers of silicon, which reduces costs substantially. In addition, the silicon dissipates heat better than sapphire. They estimate that if consumers replace existing lighting with solid state lighting, it could reduce the amount of energy used by about one third.

LED lighting technology has seen many advances in the last ten years. Because so many researchers are basing much of their research on this type of lighting, many more advancements are expected in the near future.