Making Incandescents As Efficient as CFLs
Filed Under: Environmental News, Green Technology on June 20, 2009
Anyone who hasn’t heard about the questionable “greenness” of Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFL) is probably unconcerned about energy and going green, so they wouldn’t be reading this article anyway. You’ve likely heard how these popular bulb replacements are actually worse on the after-end than regular light bulbs because of the toxic substances that are in the bulbs.
There are green CFL bulbs, of course, but good luck finding or affording them. For those of us who are concerned about the start-to-finish environmental impacts of things, though, this story will come as a piece of good news.
While LED bulbs are becoming more common and easier to find, finding one that’s bright enough to replace a normal reading lamp or overhead light is difficult. Most LED replacements are OK in a flashlight, but not bright enough to light up a whole room.
There are some advances in that regard, but they’re expensive and slow in coming. So what to do?
Never fear, the University of Rochester is here! Some scientists there have discovered that using lasers, they can change the nano/micro-scale structures of the tungsten element that makes up the little insides of a regular incandescent bulb.
Yep, those little bulbs we all thought were going to disappear. Those inefficient glowers that create more heat than light? Yep, those things.
The scientists have discovered that by making simple changes to the tungsten element, using lasers, they can turn a regular incandescent bulb into an energy-efficient source of light. Q would be proud!
Burning the filment with an ultra-intense femto-second laser (you know what that is, right?) pulse that last a few
quadrillionths of a second, can make the tungsten more effective at radiating light.
A 100-watt bulb becomes as efficient as a 60-watt bulb without losing any lumens.
That tiny laser beam? Well, it has the power of the entire moment’s electrical energy of the North American grid. Yet it uses only a small fraction (it plugs into a 110V outlet) to get that power. It’s all in the concentration, man.
The laser and setup are simple enough that it would take only small changes to the current manufacturing process for these bulbs to implement. Yet the savings could be huge. The process can even be altered to change not just the efficiency, but even the color hue of the light itself. So a bulb could emit red light, no matter what color the glass, for instance.
Pretty awesome and relatively easy to commercialize. The whole process would only ad pennies to the overall cost of a pack of light bulbs too, so your cheap incandescents (the only thing probably still keeping them on the market) are still cheap.
Win-win!
