This is one of the coolest things I’ve heard of in quite some time. Luxim is a company located in California’s Silicon Valley. They’ve developed a lightbulb the size of a Tylenol pill that gives off as much light as a streetlight.
Their light emits light equivalent to 140 lumens per watt. In comaparison, an ordinary light bulb emits about 15 lumens per watt and a high end LED emits about 70 lumens per watt.
The lightbulb uses plasma to emit light. Argon gas inside the small light bulb is electrified inside a metal ring called a puck. The puck heats the gas in the bulb into plasma and this produces light. They claim that the temperature of the plasma reaches 6000-degrees Kelvin. That’s the same temperature as the surface of the sun!!! They even claim that the light spectrum for their lightbulb is the same as the Sun. Now, they need to use this technology to create a real-life lightsaber, or a death star.
The life expectancy of the light bulb is at least 20,000 hours before reaching half-life. Watch the Tic Tac light bulb light up the screen in the video link below. Check out the video below:
Reader Comments:
Rudy on April 10th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Kristina Richardson on May 29th, 2008 at 9:48 am
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As someone who sells light bulbs for a living, I find this advancement to be exciting. Currently, we sell quite a few compact fluorescent bulbs, but many of our customers have concerns about their mercury content. If this technology were to become scaled down to a size that could be utilized by the average consumer, it would be far more efficient (in terms of lumens per watt) than compact fluorescents, and presumably less toxic.
Most CFLs today on the market contain less than 5mgs of mercury and there are CFL options out there that contain as little as 1.5mgs of mercury- which can hardly be called a ?significant amounts of mercury? considering that many item in your home contain 100s of times more of mercury including your computer. Mercury levels in CFLs can never be ?nonexistent? since mercury is a necessary component of a CFL and there is no other known element that is capable of replacing it. But CFLs actually prevent more mercury from entering the environment. According to the Union of Concerned Scientist, ?a coal-fired power plant will emit about four times more mercury to keep an incandescent bulb glowing, compared with a CFL of the same light output?.