Final Report Lot 9: Public street lighting - Amper

6.2 State of the art of best existing product technology outside the EU
The EU has premises of leading international companies in the field of lighting with also
important R&D related to street lighting within the EU.
In many cases these international companies are technological leaders for developments on
medium term (up to 5 years). These companies are internationally active and it is difficult to
allocate their activities and achievements exclusively to the EU.
On the longer term (above 5 years), the proliferation of more advanced electronic ballasts and
solid state lighting such as LEDs could be allocated to new product technology resulting from
Asian developments (actually mainly at electronic parts production level).
Developments from outside the EU:
• In 1990, a sulfur lamp was developed in the USA. This lamp produces a white light,
with a continuous spectrum and a colour rendering index Ra ≈ 80; the lamp system
efficacy is about 95 lm/W and so thelamp can be compaired with a metal halide lamp.
This lamp never reached a commercial application for many reasons:
o a microwave generator is needed to excite the sulfur to produce light,
o this generator has to be cooled by ventilators,
o the lifetime of the microwave generator and cooling is only 15,000h,
o the only available lamp power is 1000W (system power 1425W) with a lumen
output of 135,000 lumens and as a consequence not practicable in street lighting
o also the dimensions are to high for street lighting.
• A US company introduced the first low power, quarz metal halide street lighting lamps.
They focus exclusively on the development of quartz metal halide lamps with improved
colour stability.
• Advanced CMH lamps are also developed in Japan but the little information could not
be translated.
• Production of HPS lamps with an integrated reflector in Russia for street lighting,
eliminating the need for a reflector in the luminaire and therefore the optic cleaning
requirements when replacing the lamp.
• Production in China of a low cost mixed light lamp (self ballasted HPM lamp) where the
filament is replaced by a built-in halogen lamp. As mentioned earlier, this lamp can
operate without ballast. Due to the incorporated halogen lamp, the light output is a little
bit higher than for the comparable mixed light lamp. However the lamp efficacy still
remains much lower than the other HID lamps: it is only half of the efficacy of a HPM
lamp and only a quarter of the efficacy of a good HPS lamp.
• The advanced optic luminaire technology using self cleaning glass(US patent 6599618)
(6.1.1) and antireflective coatings(US patent 4173778)(6.1.4) were first disclosed in the
US.
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