The U.S. Department of energy releases reports on the life and reliability of LED lighting products

The United States Department of energy released a new report, the report on the life and reliability of solid-state lighting products were detected, and clearly shows that the current standard is not enough to provide suitable methods to define the system of life.

In the establishment of testing and rating of LED components and LED lighting system standard on the road, the solid-state lighting industry has come a long way, although the U.S. Department of energy as pointed out, life expectancy at present there is no definite method to rating lighting system. Now, there are improved methods to test and respond to the flux maintenance rate, but other properties, including power life and system level color maintenance are still difficult to quantify.

The U.S. Department of energy released a report entitled "life and reliability", an attempt to define all of the existing standards and methods of prediction, the shortcomings of the system from the full definition of the characteristics of solid state lighting products. The main problems include the existing methods mainly focus on the failure mechanism is believed to be the only light, there is no standardized approach to source components outside of solid-state lighting system of rating.

IES LM-80 standard provides the exact test method for white LED components. LM-80 also defines the components of the color and color maintenance. The IES TM-21 standard adds a method to predict life expectancy over 6000 hours of LM-80 Standard Test requirements.

At present, there is no way to test or predict color maintenance from the system level. The U.S. Department of energy says the color is no longer a problem, because it is more inconvenient, not a security issue, but the light output decline could be a security problem. Nevertheless, the lighting designer will consider unacceptable color as the product of fault.

The IES LM-84 standard defines the test method for the luminous flux and color retention rate of the bulb and lamp level. In addition, TM-28 will specify how to use LM-84 test data to reflect the life of the bulb, and IES may later be reflected in the lamp life is also added to the TM-28.

The specification does not mention the use of mixed colored LED, or remote phosphor powder product life and reliability of how to reflect. Existing standards, such as LM-80, only define the test methods of fluorescent conversion white LED, but other systems are becoming popular in some applications.