This product just got UL approval, expect it to show up for retail sales soon. What’s an ESL? Think of it as an unfocused Cathode Ray Tube or CRT. The definition at Wikipedia is: Electron Stimulated Luminescence (ESL) is light produced by accelerated electrons hitting a phosphor (fluorescent) surface in a process known as cathodoluminescence.The light generation process is similar to a cathode ray tube (CRT) but lacks magnetic or electrostatic deflection.
Just wait, somebody will figure out a yoke coil for these bad boys and a way to hack the power supply to modulate video and we’ll have little live video pictures of the sun or some other star on the phosphor screens. Or, we’ll all get to claim we have miniature particle accelerators in our ceiling. Amuse your guests with a a Geiger counter capable of recording Beta and X-rays. Don’t freak out though, we’ve been doing the same thing for half a century with bigger, badder CRT’s in TV sets. Beats having a mercury hazard around.
From the company website: Electron Stimulated Luminescence™ Lighting Technology
Overview
Electron Stimulated Luminescence™ (ESL) Lighting Technology is an entirely new, energy efficient lighting technology. It uses accelerated electrons to stimulate phosphor to create light, making the surface of the bulb “glow”. ESL technology creates the same light quality as an incandescent but is up to 70% more energy efficient, lasting up to 5 times longer than incandescent and contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. There is no use of the neurotoxin Mercury (Hg) in the lighting process.
With this technology, Vu1 has developed its first light bulb that received UL certification in October 2010: the R30 ESL bulb is specifically designed to replace the 65W incandescent R30 flood bulb is recessed light fixtures and the light quality is virtually indistinguishable from this traditional lamp it replaces and, unlike CFLs, is mercury-free.
In addition to the R30, the company is currently developing a variety of highly energy efficient, optimal light quality mercury-free light bulbs. In 2011 and 2012, Vu1 plans to introduce the classic A-type lamp for US and European consumers, the R40 for the US commercial market and the R25 in Europe.
Proven & Safe
In creating ESL Technology, Vu1 merged several existing and proven technologies then uniquely adapted them for “lighting”. The company uses commonly sourced, non-hazardous, commercial materials that are customized to our specifications.
Safe as a lighting source, the ESL technology fits neatly into classic light bulb shapes similar to those familiar to consumers everywhere. This eliminates the need to bend the technology into an unusual, twisted spiral shape (CFL) or have costly and heavy heat dissipation designed into the bulb housing (LED).
Key features of the technology and associated manufacturing processes are patent pending.
Manufacturing
Vu1 operates a wholly-owned manufacturing subsidiary, Sendio s.r.o., in the Czech Republic. This enables the company to manufacture its products directly to protect the company’s intellectual property while maintaining close control over the quality, volume and distribution of initial product production.
The 75,000 square foot facility provides Vu1 with scalable production capability. The site’s initial production capacity is up to 6.8 million bulbs annually with a planned future capacity of 30 million bulbs annually. Vu1 employs a highly skilled team that has been trained at leading manufacturers such as Philips and Sony. The facility is centrally located, enabling efficient worldwide distribution.
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Spec sheet here (PDF)
Once China gets a hold on these, the price is likely to come way down. Right now they are selling at $20.
h/t to Alan
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If I recall correctly, Nicola Tesla did a lot of work with high voltage stimulated phosphor lights:
http://www.tfcbooks.com/teslafaq/q&a_028.htm
As for ESLs replacing the 65w incandescent flood – humbug. I want to replace the 120w floods now no longer on the market. My 3000 sf basement was designed for them; they keep it warm and bright down there in the winter. As someone with winter blues and migraines, the type of light I bask in is critical.
Paramount to personal health, however, is personal freedom. Don’t dictate my lightbulb, toilet tank size, and thermostat, thank you. And get the ethanol out of my tank. Our forebears (and betters) rebelled for far less.
The Future of the Light Bulb Ban
See also:
http://www.infowars.com/new-eco-fascist-light-bulbs-to-cost-50-each/
New Eco-fascist Light Bulbs to Cost $50 Each
Get ready to shell out big bucks for light bulbs. Beginning in January, conventional light bulbs will be outlawed by the state. You will have to buy organic light-emitting diode bulbs that cost $50.
Compact fluorescents are less expensive, but contain toxic mercury vapor. In 2008, it was discovered that fluorescent bulbs cause migraine headaches.
“Neurologists are increasingly taking notice of the headaches and migraines being reported by people exposed to compact fluorescent light bulbs,” Mike Adams of Natural News wrote earlier this year, noting that electromagnetic pollution caused by the so-called “energy efficient” bulbs is “causing devastating health effects on some people.”
Congress passed a law in 2007 outlawing conventional light bulbs and creating a new class of criminals. “Manufacturers will no longer be able to make the 100-watt Thomas Edison bulb after Jan. 1, 2012, followed by the 75-watt version in Jan. 2013, and the the 60- and 40-watt bulbs in Jan. 2014,” a law signed by George W. Bush states. The legislation is similar to laws in Europe, where incandescent bulbs began to be phased out in 2009.
In response to the government ban, people began stockpiling incandescent light bulbs. About 13% of Americans said they would stock up on 100-watt incandescents and continue using them after they are phased out in January, according to a recent survey.
“The light bulb ban is also a foretaste of what’s to come as the enforcement arm of the eco-fascist agenda unfolds,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote in February. “As we have documented, enviro-Nazis envisage a future world in which car use will be heavily restricted, CO2 emissions will be rationed, meat will be considered a rare delicacy, the state will decide your career, and only the mega-rich elitists enforcing all these new rules and regulations will be exempt from them.”
As the economy worsens, the new law may force many people to choose between lighting their homes and eating or paying other necessary utility bills. Replacing more than a couple light bulbs will cost hundreds of dollars.
+1 (Light bulb hoarding/light bulb black markets)
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Nice. So long as it doesn’t leave a mysterious skeletal shadow on the wall behind my recliner, like my old man’s television set did, I’ll use em.
$20 a pop?! Oof!
If they work well and are liked, the mere fact that they’re more appealing to consumers than CFLs should begin to bring prices down.
Having Chinese manufacture it though… I don’t know if I’d want it… they might figure out how to put some lead or mercury in it for good old times sake.
I wouldn’t be too hard on the CFLs. A simple warning label will do:
“Warning: Do not let this product come in contact with your skin. Do not breath the fumes. Do not have children after using this product. Do not buy this product. Do not even read this warning.”
“Warning” by Dave Barry
I assume these involve the use of vacuum tubes, you know those things that implode when you drop them.
Beware of flying glass.
From Neil Jones on May 17, 2011 at 11:01 pm:
The beloved incandescent bulb is also a “vacuum tube.” This is readily shown by using a gas torch with a pinpoint flame to “draw” smiley faces on a bulb, as my father showed me. The glass sucks in when softened. (Does that qualify as the Greens destroying an art form?)
Note this is best practiced on a dead intact bulb, due to the tendency of a pinhole getting formed if the flame dwells too long at one spot, if you want your final masterpieces to be self-illuminating. ☺
One nifty light bulb I picked up last week is a halogen bulb inside a standard glass bulb and claims to use 75 W to produce the equivalent light output of a 100 W bulb. It certainly does seem bright and I can fit it into my ceiling sockets which are limited to a max of 75 W.
Thus far I haven’t been overly impressed by LED’s as they are still too dim. I have some 1 watt LED’s outside of the house wired to be always on and they are nice at night — especially the red one on the upper deck that lets me keep my night vision when I do some stargazing.
WRT the new ESL bulb, I might buy one just to take it apart as I presume it has a HV supply within it. I have some incredibly strong magnets salvaged from 1930’s era chart recorders and would be interesting to see the effects of them on the electron beam. Unfortunately all of the deflection yokes I salvaged from old TV sets were used as a source of wire for winding my own transformers and relays during my childhood.
What CFL bulbs will do is limit neurophysiology experimentation to daylight hours only. Back in my research days when I used to stick glass microelectrodes into neurons, all of the fluorescent bulbs in the lab would be turned off as they radiate a massive amount of electrical noise. Distant incandescents are far far electrically quieter and easier to filter as their electrical signal is a straight 60 Hz instead of multiple harmonics that one gets from fluorescents. Eventually we ended up constructing a Faraday cage to house the experimental apparatus, but even with a wire mesh cage one could see external electrical noise probably conducted via electrode amplifier wiring (the extracellular signals we were recording were in the tens of microvolts compared to the massive intracellular signals in the millivolt range). I haven’t seen what the electrical noise spectrum is like for LED’s.
The radiation from CRT’s reminded me of one of the old Amateur Scientist columns in Scientific American; back in the days when there was real science in that magazine. One of the projects was to take a burned out radio tube with a metallic “getter” coating in the top, put an Al foil electrode over the top of the tube and then connect the cathode to a HV power supply. Can’t remember if this was an ignition coil or a flyback transformer. I started to build one but the effects of getting zapped with the HV supply a number of times convinced me to get into lower voltage transistorized circuitry for my electronics experimentation instead. Now that I’m less clumsy than I used to be as age 12, perhaps revisiting this project might be worthwhile. I’m curious if anyone remembers more details about that DIY xray machine which is probably from the 1940’s or 1950’s Amateur scientist section.
Update: Please make a note of the advancement (in 1913) in the state-of-the-art regarding Incandescent light bulb composition/construction for such reasons as:
Reducing filament evaporation
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb
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An interesting read (for tech geeks appreciative of such history) on Nobel Laureate Dr. Irving Langmuir (1881-1957) and his work on:
The Gas-Filled Incandescent Lamp – http://home.frognet.net/~ejcov/gasfilled.html
Several early inventors developed incandescent lamps that contained a gas filling. Those early efforts did not result in truly successful products and the aim of this writing is to comment on the features needed in such a lamp for it to be successful. This can be done by comparing early lamp designs with the later successful design of Irving Langmuir.
The necessary attributes of an efficient gas-filled lamp can be determined from the work performed by Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir. Langmuir’s biography and technical articles dealing with incandescent lamps are available in Volumes 12 and 2, respectively, of The Collected Works of Irving Langmuir, C. Guy Suits, General Editor, Pergamon Press, New York, 1960.
In the year 1911 Irving Langmuir began a scientific investigation to understand the effects of the interaction of gases with incandescent filaments.
Platinum and tungsten filaments were used with gases such as hydrogen, nitrogen and air. Total power loss from a filament was determined to be mainly via radiation and convection. End losses through the lead wires, being rather small, are excluded from discussion here. Radiation losses could be calculated easily but the convection loss needed to be understood.
The convection loss from a filament was found to be dependent on what Langmuir termed the “shape factor” of the filament as well as the thermal conductivity of the fill gas. Very close to the filament in an ordinary household lamp the heat is conducted away from the filament, just as heat is conducted along a poker in a fire.
Out away from the filament the heat is than convected away. The region about a filament through which conduction takes place is a few millimeters thick. In the lamp industry this region is referred to as the Langmuir film or sheath. The air flow about a vertically or horizontally oriented filament can be visualized by a schlieren technique.
It should be mentioned that this boundary layer, through which conduction takes place, is present about any body that is heated relative to the surrounding gas atmosphere. For example, one can sometimes detect the boundary layer and shimmering air flow about a heated furnace when sunlight casts shadows of the furnace on a wall.
MORE – see link above.
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Science … gotta love it …
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Another alternative lighting system: light emitting plasma
For example, Luxim: http://www.luxim.com
@ur momisugly _Jim (May 18, 2011 at 6:51 am and 7:23 am)
Now we’re just comparing definitions of “vacuum” and “filled.” It’s obvious the bulb interior is at a lower pressure than atmospheric as the softened glass is sucked inwards. And it’s not pressure from the flame jet pushing the glass inward, I’ve done it with a pocket-sized small butane torch.
Moreover, for very good scientific reasons, you don’t want atmospheric pressure levels inside a normal incandescent bulb. There’s the issue of heat convection away from the heated filament, reducing efficiency, thus lower pressure would be preferred to reduce conduction. Your second link specified a cold fill of 80% of atmospheric, which went to a full atmosphere in use, but that was for the tests of the mentioned researcher. In practice you want lower than atmospheric in a heated bulb. Why? Safety reasons. If broken the lower pressure draws the shards inward. The same bulb made for use at sea level is sold for use on mountaintops, thus would be pressurized at high altitudes if designed for a full atmosphere when used. I have noticed this is true of bulbs in use during outdoors work when a bulb is cracked by thermal stress when a raindrop lands on one. Vapor is seen to enter the bulb through the crack and swirl around, indicating lower than local air pressure inside the bulb, before the filament dies.
Thus, as I have known from observation, a standard household incandescent bulb is a “vacuum tube,” with a partial vacuum. It is “filled” with specific gases as you have said but at lower than atmospheric pressure, low enough that it is still below atmospheric pressure when heated during use.
I knew that there would be a ban in Norway for incandescent bulbs, thanks to the global warming religious leaders.
Therefore I calculated how many bulbs I would be needing in my house the next 50 years (thinking that I have less than 50 years to live), based on normal use and experience.
Then I bought those bulbs and have them stacked in the basement.
When I tell the socialists at work, they stare at me in disbelief.
However, soon the Norwegian state police will invade each and every home in order to check that we are only using socialistically inclined light sources.
Geir
re Norway
Particularly ironic the ban in Norway – no energy shortage, no emissions, cold conditions etc
Mirrors the Canadian situation,
but a 2 year delay on light bulb regulations is now proposed by the Canadian government,
http://ceolas.net/#li01inx
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Wow-this technology has been lurking under our noses for decades. My guess is that little of it is patentable which might be a good thing for consumers.
VU1 will soak the early-adopters $20 a pop to recoup development costs; all companies do this. Cost should fall rapidly, especially when there is competition.
X-rays are produced when electrons strike an atom. Light elements produce only “soft” x-rays no matter how hard they’re hit; heavier elements produce “harder” (more energetic) x-rays if they are hit hard enough. That scenario requires the electrons be accelerated by higher voltages. Hard x-rays require more shielding. By the time color TVs were common, the rectifier and regulator tubes were gone, but the voltage applied to the CRT was 3 times higher. I don’t know about the phosphors, but I’d guess the metallic shadow mask in color CRTs produced most of the x-rays that provoked the requirement of lead in the glass. The accelerating voltage in the ESL lamps is probably quite low, but I would hope that someone (UL?) is checking the x-ray emission.
BTW, most fluorescent and some LED lamps leak UV radiation–so, name your poison–UV or x-rays.
I have found few applications for CFLs indoors because a) there is a dimmer in the circuit, b) it’s a three-way socket or, c) it just doesn’t fit. Throw in the slow turn-on, high failure rate, poor color rendition, poor power factor, fear of mercury vapor release, disposal hassles, etc. and these things are hard to love. I use ’em in the garage, but I tend to leave them on all day to avoid the warm-up delay so there goes the savings.
The biggest issue I have with the ESL lamps is that their light is ultimately emitted by phosphors. So the light is only an approximation of black-body radiation and subject to constraints of the costs of the phosphors and their efficiencies. Still, they may be the best of a bad lot.
One more observation: Where I live in California, electricity may actually be cheaper per BTU than propane. Any energy “wasted” by incandescent lamps during the heating season contributes to keeping me warm. I don’t have an air conditioner, so I’m not spending money to pump away the excess heat from inefficient lighting in the summer. One needs to look at the big picture.