NYTimes (blog), a few others: Zap it and an old incandescent bulb is suddenly a lot brighter (and greener, in any color you like)
Hey, Congress didn’t plan on anybody making an actually sort of efficient incandenscent light bulb. But researchers at the University of Rochester may have done it. To back up: Congress recently voted to require a phase-out of ordinary, electricity-gulping incandescent bulbs starting with a ban on manufacture of 100-watt ones in three years and working down to smaller ones. The bill says all bulbs must use at least 30 percent less electricity than the old Edison-type filament bulbs do, leaving the market to fluorescent, LED, and other bulbs. Don’t write the obits for these venerable bulbs quite yet.
This is just out so not much pickup yet, but some. In the NYTimes Green Inc. Blog, writer Leora Broydo Vestel uses this development to lead a wrap-up of efforts to radically increase incandescent bulb efficiency. She says the dark horse in the race to replace old fashioned incandescent light bulb is…new fashioned ones.
In a paper coming out in Physical Research Letters, a U. of R. optics lab team reports they used a laser beam to nano-etch a far more efficient light-emitting surface on the tungsten filaments of regular bulbs. They just shot the laser right through a standard bulbs glass for a femtosecond or so and voila!, the spot on the filament that they hit glowed about twice as bright at no extra power. That, if it proves practical, should keep the iconic old bulbs we’ve all known legal for awhile. And, it says here, they might even have a better overall color. Or not. One wonders what it costs in time and energy to resurface a whole filament, and what it does to the filament’s lifespan before burning out.
Grist for the Mill: Univ. Rochester Press Release ;
-CP
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June 11th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I wonder who first thought of that one!
A great idea really
One might note that it’s unprecedented to ban a simple safe product like the ordinary light bulb
- it’s not like banning lead paint or dodgy fireworks, is it?
There is no energy supply shortage in society, and consumers could decide for themselves between the advantages that all types of lighting have, including of course light bulbs with their quick response bright broad spectrum light.
As for emissions, light bulbs don’t give out gases, power stations do, and their emissions can be dealt with directly in several ways, as described on
http://www.ceolas.net/#em1x
Overall energy/emission savings are low anyway for all reasons given on http://www.ceolas.net/#li13x onwards.
Even if light bulbs needed to be targeted, taxation would be more logical, as it lowers use and gives government income that can be used to further lower emissions more than any remaining light bulbs cause them.