LED lighting is increasingly replacing legacy light sources (mercury vapor, metal halide and sodium vapor) in outdoor applications as a result of technological revolutions in LED efficiency (higher lumens per watt), secondary optics (better lenses/reflectors), and greater thermal dissipation.
Todd Phillips, Global Marketing Manager, Littelfuse shares trends in LED lighting application in Indian scenario.
India is converting their outdoor street lighting to LED at a faster pace than any other country in the world. Their plans to convert 35 million street lights to LED in the next 5 years is phenomenal.
LED Application trends in Street Lighting
From the electronics side, newer LED driver circuits are improving the efficiency and reliability. As the complexity & reliability is increasing, the use for robust protection circuits is becoming a necessity to ensure the luminaire investments are able to meet the lower maintenance costs & longer lifetime
The Littelfuse Surge Protection Modules are self-protected devices that can be used in outdoor and commercial LED lighting fixtures for transient overvoltage protection.
They are constructed with Littelfuse thermally protected varistor technology. The built-in thermal disconnect provides additional protection against catastrophic failure/fire hazard under varistor end-of- life or sustained overvoltage conditions. The LSP product series facilitates surge immunity compliance to IEEE C62.41.2 Location Category C High Exposure, ANSI C136.2, and US Dept of Energy MSSLC Model Spec.
One of the great benefits to LED street lighting is the potential for less maintenance than previously installed, older technologies such as mercury vapor or metal halide lights. While in a perfect lab scenario, LED lighting will last far longer than its older predecessor technologies, the real world is not as kind to LED as the lab. In the real-world, transient events are able to cause damage within the LED street light more easily than they could damage the older technologies used in street lighting. Providing proper transient surge protection is the only option to extend the life of the LED street light, making the entire LED luminaire (including the surge protector) less susceptible to surge and thus making the real-world feel more like the lab to the LED luminaire.
Littelfuse solutions
To enable each municipality to achieve the low maintenance costs necessary to offset the higher cost of LED lights, Littelfuse offers the LSP10-series surge protection modules. These surge protection modules limit the amount of potentially damaging surge transients from reaching the sensitive electronics of a LED luminaire, thus helping it to achieve the desired life and low maintenance expected.
