Re: LED\'s compared to normal light bulbs
this is just an article i read in discover magazine i thought might be interesting..
Goodbye and thank you, Thomas Edison. Your incandescent lightbulb, which has turned night into day for more than 100 years, could be driven to extinction by the light-emitting diode (LED). The new wizard on the block is Fred Schubert, a 44-year-old electrical engineer at Boston University who has transformed a familiar technology--the tiny colored indicator lights on computers are LEDs--into a powerful, energy-saving source of ambient white light. Schubert's bulb is actually a chip made of gallium indium nitride that emits primarily blue light. Part of that light is, in turn, absorbed by a second chip bonded to the first chip, which transforms a portion of these rays into yellow light. When the two complementary colors combine, they create for the human eye the sensation of white light.
This bulb, invented by Schubert and graduate students Xiaoyun (Jane) Guo and John Graff, may turn out to be the world's most efficient light source, because it generates white light without unwanted heat. Unlike incandescents, LED bulbs don't emit infrared light, which we cannot see but do experience as heat. "I told my students, 'We aim to do better than the sun,'" jokes Schubert. His LEDs will feel cooler than today's compact fluorescents. And they are smaller than a dime: A round wafer two inches in diameter can be diced up into 10,000 individual light sources. Soon we'll be able to throw out our cumbersome lamps and instead light rooms with rows of tiny LEDs tucked into the ceiling recesses. In time, the use of LED ambient light could reduce the nation's total electricity consumption by 10 percent. If Schubert is right, this will mean we wont need to build another power planet for 15 years. Unless, he warns, we go crazy with the lights.
