Hubbell announces LED street light fixture and retrofit kit

Hubbell Outdoor Lighting has announced a new LED street light and an SSL retrofit kit for legacy lights, that both use a light engine developed in partnership with Hella.

Hubbell Roadway RF LED Retrofit Kit

Hubbell Outdoor Lighting announced the Roadway RM LED Series of cobra-head street lights, and the Roadway RF LED Retrofit Kit for upgrades of legacy lighting in NEMA-compliant fixtures. Both are based on light-engine technology jointly developed by Hubbell and Hella. Hella is manufacturing the light engine in its Flora, Illinois facility.


Hubbell is integrating the light engine into its new RM series and delivering a complete roadway light for deployment in new-installation or luminaire-replacement scenarios. Alternatively, Hubbell will supply the retrofit kit based on the light engine for direct replacement of legacy lighting sources in cobra-head fixtures manufactured by Hubbell, American Electric, Lithonia, GE Lighting, and others.

Hubbell Roadway RM LED Series

The light engine operates over a universal range of 120-277 VAC. The 68W design delivers 6087 lm. Hubbell says that the roadway series will typically serve in place of 100-150W high-pressure-sodium (HPS) or mercury-vapor fixtures. The retrofit kit is designed as an upgrade for 100-175W legacy lamps.


The light engine integrates 48 LEDs, each with total internal reflection (TIR) optics that form a Type II beam pattern. The design features a 4800K CCT and delivers 89 lm/W in efficacy. Hubbell projects an L90 life of 48,000 hours and L70 life in excess of 100,000 hours.

Taiwan invests in LED street lighting, government urged to do more

Taiwan has begun a three-year project to replace 53,000 street lights with LEDs, while a report from a strategy meeting urges greater investment to help Taiwan’s LED manufacturers.
According to an article published in Taiwan Today, Shih Yen-shiang of Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), has announced a NT$700 million (US$23.25 million) project that will involve the replacement of 53,000 street lamps with LED lamps.

Minister Shih Yen-shiang.
The ROC government will begin the 3-year replacement project in January 2012. It will involve LED lamp installations in the cities of Keelung, Hsinchu and Chiayi. Shih announced the plan after meeting with LED companies including Everlight Electronics, Epistar and Delta Electronics.


“This replacement project will not only provide the nation with energy efficient lighting,” Shih said, “it will also give local LED manufacturers a tremendous boost, as the experience they acquire from manufacturing and installing the new lights will help make them more competitive internationally.”


Shih noted the importance of standards and stated that the government will accelerate its efforts to promote standards for the LED industry. The ministry noted that the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection has already set 49 specifications for the LED industry, on matters such as acceptable power density and energy-efficiency levels.


Government urged to act now
Meanwhile, Taiwan Economic News reported on a conference held in mid-October involving Taiwan manufacturers, think tanks and academia aimed at making the island’s LED manufacturers more competitive worldwide. These participants urged the government to subsidize LED lamp usage in homes and promote LED street-lighting projects. It was also suggested that the Taiwanese government fund LED R&D and coordinate vertical integration among the island’s LED manufacturers.


The conference was organized by the National Taiwan University Technology Policy & Industry Development Center (NTUTPIDC) and the Taiwan Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers’ Association (TEEMA). Invited representatives included participants from the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) and Taiwan Research Institute (TRI).


At the conference, YF Yeh of Everlight Electronics cited a study from market-research firm Strategies Unlimited, which showed that South Korea unseated Taiwan in 2009 as the world’s number two LED supplier, which, he said, should be a lesson for the Taiwan government in overlooking South Korean underselling to encroach on market shares held by Taiwan’s DRAM and LCD manufacturers, who were counted on to drive the nation’s economy.
ITRI’s statistics show South Korea accounted for 24.1% of global market for LED packages last year while Taiwan accounted for 19.1%.


The article estimated that replacement of all lighting in Taiwan with LEDs could conserve 22.4 billion kWh of electricity a year, equivalent to that generated by Taiwan’s three nuclear power plants.

Cooper provides downlights for sustainable research center in Kansas

Cooper Lighting has provided Halo LED downlights and RL7 fixtures to the University of Kansas for its new Center for Design Research.
Cooper Lighting, a provider of solid-state lighting and controls based in Peachtree City, GA, has supplied Energy-Star-qualified Halo LED recessed downlights with All-Pro RL7 LED module-trim fixtures as part of an overall sustainable solution for the Center for Design Research on the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence.

The KU Center for Design Research includes several high-efficiency interior and exterior lighting products. The Center is projected to be the first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum building in Kansas based on its sustainable systems. LEED certification is provided by the US Green Building Council. Program incentives for certification vary by state, but can include tax credits, tax breaks, priority or expedited permitting, technical assistance, grants and low-interest loans.
The RL7 LED lighting fixture is designed to meet the needs of commercial and residential new construction as well as retrofit installations. The fixture offers energy savings, ample light output, ease of installation and long-life.CRI is 81 and the CCT is 3000K. Lights in the series are dimmable, consume less than 15W and deliver over 600 lm. The RL7 lens provides uniform illumination and wet-location listing. The RL7 die-cast construction makes the housing air-tight for HVAC savings and code compliance.
"The LED downlights featured in the building, much like the design itself, represent forward-thinking and showcase the next generation of interior lighting. We are extremely proud to be a part of a facility that aids in sustainable education for the university and community," said Mark Eubanks, president of Cooper Lighting.

Cree begins expansion of Ruud's Wisconsin LED-fixture manufacturing facility

Following its acquisition of Ruud Lighting and the BetaLED SSL product portfolio, Cree has just broken ground on a $24.5 million expansion of Ruud's Racine, WI manufacturing facility.
Cree acquired Ruud Lighting back in August and has now announced plans for a 208,000-ft2 expansion of Ruud's Racine, Wisconsin manufacturing facility. The company broke ground on the $24.5-million expansion on November 15, and said it will create 469 new jobs over the next four years driven by the growth in LED-based solid-state-lighting (SSL) deployment.


Ruud has been a pioneer in LED lighting with its BetaLED brand and has done especially well in outdoor-lighting applications. Chuck Swoboda, chairman and CEO of Cree, said, “Last month this facility shipped its 500,000th LED luminaire - further evidence of the market demand for the latest LED technology and a need to expand our facilities to maintain our leadership of the LED lighting revolution.”


The company will receive incentives totaling $8 million to help fund the project with the funds coming relative to job creation. The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, Racine County, Racine County Economic Development Corporation, and the Village of Sturtevant are all participating in the incentives.


Combining Cree Lighting and Ruud
The expansion will create space for new manufacturing lines that will produce both existing and new Cree Lighting products – including fixtures with heritage in Ruud and Cree. Ruud is operating as a subsidiary under the Cree Lighting organization that is focused on SSL fixtures as opposed to the LED-component focus of the overall Cree organization. We previously estimated that the combined Ruud and Cree lighting businesses would account for 20-25% of Cree's total revenue.


Cree has been operating a fixture-manufacturing line for Cree Lighting products at its Raleigh, North Carolina headquarters. The line has now been converted to a rapid-prototyping facility with all manufacturing moved to Racine.
Swoboda said, "Cree’s recent acquisition of Ruud Lighting and its BetaLED products brought together two leading LED lighting companies under one roof." Clearly the company is moving quickly to fully integrate the operations.


The expanded facility will primarily create jobs in fixture-assembly operations according to Cree, although the growth in general of the LED-lighting market will create other positions as well. The company also said it needed an expansion of its component- and product-storage capacity.


"This is exciting news for the lighting industry and Racine County," said Christopher Ruud, president of Cree’s Ruud Lighting subsidiary. "Beyond Cree’s dedication to advancing LED lighting technology, it’s a long-term investment in the people of Racine County and the community’s manufacturing base."

Digital Lumens adds higher-output LED luminaires with IP-65 rating

Digital Lumens is expanding its Intelligent Lighting Systems family with new 18,000- and 26,000-lm SSL fixtures and supporting deployment in wet locations for the first time.

Targeting a broader range of commercial and industrial high-bay lighting applications, Digital Lumens has introduced new 18,000- and 26,000-lm, LED-based fixtures with integrated network controls. The new solid-state-lighting (SSL) products mark the first time the company has delivered IP-65-rated products for wet locations, and added a daylight-harvesting element to the company's Intelligent Lighting System.

Adaptive network controls have been at the heart of Digital Lumens' technology since the inception of the company, as its fixtures can deliver 90% energy savings by combining energy-efficient SSL with aggressive dimming schemes. The new products take the control capability to the next level by monitoring ambient light levels on a fixture-by-fixture basis ensuring no area is consuming excess power due to over lighting.

The existing 10,000- and 15,000-lm products have been deployed primarily in warehouses, especially in cold storage, where no significant ambient light is present. Senior product manager Joe Adiletta says that the higher-output of new fixtures will lead to usage in open docks, manufacturing areas, and even covered parking structures where daylight enters through windows, doors, other openings, and even skylights.

Fluorescent and HID replacements

The luminaires are meant as functional alternatives to 4- and 6-lamp fluorescent fixtures, and the company says the SSL alternative will yield significant savings over fluorescent lamps and even greater savings relative to HID lighting. Director of marketing Allison Parker said that the new fixtures can cut annual energy costs to $0.03/ft2 based on an electricity rate of $0.09/kWh. She said HID lighting can cost $0.46/ft2 annually.

“The higher lumen output, integrated daylight harvesting, and enhancements to the Intelligent Lighting System make Digital Lumens’ solutions more appealing to a broader range of our industrial customers, including those looking for lumen-for-lumen replacements of their 400W metal halide or 6- and 8-lamp fluorescent fixtures,” said Gary Hubbard, project manager for Leading Edge Design Group, a Digital Lumens reseller. “Facilities engineers are very interested in controllable high-bay LED lighting and we’re very excited to offer the expanded Digital Lumens portfolio to them.”

Like the prior Digital Lumens products, the new fixtures are controlled by the company's PC-based LightRules software that can communicate wirelessly with each fixture. Users can configure each fixture individually or in groups. And now the user can prescribe a light level that can be partially fulfilled by ambient light adding to the energy savings. LightRules can monitor and display the savings attributable to ambient light.

There are certainly other lighting systems on the market that use photocells to detect ambient lighting and feedback that information to a controller. Adiletta said, however, that Digital Lumens is the first to integrate sensors in every fixture offering more granular control of the light and the energy used.

Uniformity and transitions

The company also says the integrated sensor will improve lighting quality. Adiletta said, "You are going to get a much more even distribution of light across the space. And you will get a smoother transition from dim to light."

Parker said that the photocells that are added to competitive products add too much cost for deployment with each fixture. Digital Lumens minimized the cost by using image-sensor technology borrowed from cell phones and digital cameras and by relying on the microprocessor already integrated in its fixtures to process the sensor data.

The new fixtures look a bit different from Digital Lumens existing products, and that is primarily due to design elements that support the IP-65 requirements. The luminaires still include a trio of aim-able light bars, but those bars are comprised of multiple 6-LED modules that each feature optics that seal to rear housing and heat sink.

The new fixtures also feature a lower CCT of 5000K relative to the 6500K CCT of earlier products. The warmer CCT will certainly be favorable in some of the expanded scope of applications. Moreover, the change came with efficacy improvements to 85 lm/W (18,000 lm) and 81 lm/W (24,000 lm). Prior products had been in the mid-70-lm/W range and the efficacy improvement is primarily due to baseline improvement in LED technology.

OLEDs: Osram, EU flexible-OLED project, NanoMarkets, OSA

Osram has announced a record-breaking flexible OLED, while a EU-funded group headed up by Imec will also pursue flexible OLEDs with built-in intelligence. NanoMarkets has published an OLED materials market report and the OSA has published a volume of OLED research papers.
Osram achieves record efficiency using for OLEDs
Researchers from Osram have developed a flexible OLED technology which reached an efficiency of 32 lm/W – a record value according to the company.

The OLED design uses a top-emitter approach, where light is emitted out the top of the device rather than through the substrate as in traditional rigid OLEDs. The highly-reflective substrate is a thin steel foil (~100 µm). Top-emitter designs have traditionally been a more challenging approach to producing high-quality white light.

To ensure product consistency and scalability, the OLED approach was tested on a large-surface OLED sample using a fixed brightness setting of 1000 cd/m2. The measurements were made in an integrating sphere – without using any manipulating macroextractors such as lens assemblies to help increase the light yield.

Osram’s head of technology, Thomas Dobbertin, stated that “with this sample, we are able to demonstrate that flexible OLED can already be significantly more efficient than halogen lamps. This was only made possible thanks to our ability to transfer our strong competence in the field of vacuum processing of organic functional materials and space-saving thin-film encapsulation onto flexible OLED.”

In related news, Osram was the OLED provider behind a very large, interactive OLED installation at the Qubique design fair at the Tempelhof airport in Berlin. The 6-meter-high cubic structure (12 x 12 m total) contains numerous 2-mm thick OLED panels arranged in a three-dimensional interactive display. The display uses sound and motion sensors to respond to a viewer’s approach. The installation was designed by Simon Brünner and contains 1362 OLED light modules.

Osram also recently opened its first OLED pilot production line in Regensburg, where it expects to reduce production OLED manufacturing cost by 90%.