Re: Reinventing the lightbulb, with nanotubes
Interesting article. I'm not sure we'll ever see these in stores though as "More work needs to be done but I would say the bulbs could be available within three to five years." according to the article. By then we'll start to see LED incandescent replacements, and we already have CFLs. Unless there is some compelling advantage of these over the other two incandescent replacement technologies I'm not sure if the economics justify producing it. No mention of what temperatures the filament is capable of operating at either (other than "The nanotube bulb uses less electricity and burns brighter than conventional bulbs."), although if they can get it up to at least 4000K that will make for both a more efficient and prettier (in terms of light quality) light bulb. I also though it was interesting in that the filament emits some of it's light by electroluminescence. Now we have an incandescent trying to imitate a fluorescent or an LED. [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] Kind of funny if you think about it.
While I'm not saying the incandescent light in any form is dead yet, it already has quite a few nails in its coffin. Unless someone can invent a filament that can run at about 6000 to 6500K (the temperature at which a blackbody radiator reaches its peak efficiency of 95 or so lm/W) I believe we'll see the incandescent light bulb slowly start to die off. Even my hypothetical high-temperature incandescent probably wouldn't be able to compete with LEDs in terms of efficiency by around 2010 or so, so all it'll do is prolong the death a bit more.
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