On Mon, 07 Apr 2008 03:46:21 GMT, "James Sweet"
wrote:
Some incandescent technology might come down the pike to produce light
efficiently - isn't the sulphur lamp an incandescent lamp?
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There are various technologies to improve the efficiency of incandescent,
I'm sure something better will come along eventually.
The sulphur lamp has long been discontinued. It isn't incandescent anyway,
it used a magnetron to excite sulphur inside a globe, it was noisy, not very
scaleable, and the light apparently was greenish, though I never saw one in
operation.
I was (over) reacting to Blake's idea of filling one's basement with
incandescent bulbs - allowing for a certain amount of hyperbole: a
little arithmetic on the number of bulbs used, life expectancy of the
bulb, size of the basement, life expectancy of the user etc., would
indicate a lot of hyperbole.
Technology marches along and you (or Blake) aren't the only one(s)
looking for a full spectrum lamp that approximates sunlight accurately
- so there is a market for it. (like "warm white" LED's still not
incandescent, but market and demand driven to improve the technology)
The original sulphur lamps were blue white but full spectrum. And
looking at the design, they took some industrial microwave oven
magnetrons, aimed them at a small globe of sulphur and that was pretty
much it - I'd question their integrity, they may have been scamming
the DEO for development funds, given the crude model, time spent and
lack of finesse.
(but they did come up with a proof of concept)
I think they burned something like 5 KW to get 1KW to the emitter for
a luminous efficiency worse than fluorescent lamps when all was said
and done - even before reflector losses and transmission losses.
They almost had to go big with the concept lamps since they used low
frequency microwaves. A pea sized sulphur lamp might need a much
higher excitation frequency so they'd have to buy some expensive
military magnetrons or develop their own - and run afoul of the FCC in
the process. The need to rotate the bulb was found to be unnecessary
because the microwaves can used to rotate the plasma but they were
already out of business by then.
I've already adapted to the CF lamps - but still have a few
incandescent ones - for the bedroom and beer aging room. I even
switched out a 75 W outdoor flood with a home made trio of Cree 1 W
leds.
I find the white/blue light desirable when using a flashlight and
especially outdoors at night.
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