Better TVs are always great but maybe this will be a serendipitous crosspollination to horticulture. Different plants do better under different lighting and this might allow for tweaking the spectrum and having a more standardized grow room where the crops change but the equipment doesn’t.
Could also be good for simulating a dusk/dawn light cycle, which is important with humans but also some plants and animals.
It relies on Europium, whose emission spectrum looks like the full rainbow. Europium is currently about $1,000 a pound, so I wonder if this will move the price up after a couple years of development work?
I would need to see a lot of details on the LED’s spectrum to decide how it would do for general lighting. Basically, if you adjust it to white, would it be three dominant lines or a nice even spectrum more akin to sunlight? That makes a big difference in the color rendering index, with determines whether the market is K-Mart’s overhead lighting or what the Louvre would use for the Mona Lisa. That doesn’t matter with TV’s or computer screens because their light isn’t bouncing off any pigments before it hits your retina’s photo receptors, at least if you aren’t relying on your TV as a night light.
For plants, you’d want the opposite of a good color rendering index, with several narrow spectral lines at 420, 470, 650, and about 680 nanometers, to hit the absorption bands for chlorophyll a and b, plus some other minor signaling bands that some plants use as regulators. The grow light looks purple and the plants look black because they reflect very little red or blue light.
Years ago I wrote some software to compare a vast number of different high-output LED’s for grow lights I was building, so I dug into it pretty deeply.
Long term, the most important thing in grow lights is simple photonic efficiency in the specific chlorophyll bands. Higher efficiency also means less waste heat, and thus smaller heat sinks and heat rejection equipment.
Coupled with more efficient solar arrays, we’re not far from the point where solar cells and LED lighting would be more efficient than greenhouse windows for growing plants in deep space, on a square-meter basis. They are already be far superior to windows if you consider what it takes to design, install, launch, and support large windows in a human occupied pressure vessel. They also decouple the light collection area from the physical layout of the space station, and allow the amount of greenhouse area to expand simply by adding more solar cells, as opposed to designing and building a bigger ship with more windows.
Why do the rare-earths sound like fictitious chemical elements from a movie script?
“The gadolinium levels are off the charts!”
” a new approach to making LEDs that uses a rare earth ion”
Wonderful! What could possibly go wrong? Can you get this anywhere other than China?
Sure. It’s Europium. It comes from Europe.
That was a Final Jeopardy question last week, and the reigning champion got it. I think the question was something like “This element is mined in Africa and Asia, but not in the continent it was named for.” The other two guessed Americium.
:frystare.jpg:
If your 4k monitor (8 megapixels) has 24 megapixels because they only need LED per pixel, you still need a graphics card that has three times as much memory among other things to drive it at the higher resolution (call it 7k because you get squareroot of 3 times as much pixels width with single-LED pixels). I think it’s more useful for VR where tripling the number of megapixels on a vive pro’s 2 megapixels per eye could go up to 3.5 megapixels per eye with the same LED count and still be driven by the same graphics card to run a 4k monitor.
I’ve seen commentary in other places that the usefulness in VR would likely come from more densely packing the pixels and eliminating the “screen door” effect of having your eyes so close to the screen.
Better TVs are always great but maybe this will be a serendipitous crosspollination to horticulture. Different plants do better under different lighting and this might allow for tweaking the spectrum and having a more standardized grow room where the crops change but the equipment doesn’t.
Could also be good for simulating a dusk/dawn light cycle, which is important with humans but also some plants and animals.
It relies on Europium, whose emission spectrum looks like the full rainbow. Europium is currently about $1,000 a pound, so I wonder if this will move the price up after a couple years of development work?
I would need to see a lot of details on the LED’s spectrum to decide how it would do for general lighting. Basically, if you adjust it to white, would it be three dominant lines or a nice even spectrum more akin to sunlight? That makes a big difference in the color rendering index, with determines whether the market is K-Mart’s overhead lighting or what the Louvre would use for the Mona Lisa. That doesn’t matter with TV’s or computer screens because their light isn’t bouncing off any pigments before it hits your retina’s photo receptors, at least if you aren’t relying on your TV as a night light.
For plants, you’d want the opposite of a good color rendering index, with several narrow spectral lines at 420, 470, 650, and about 680 nanometers, to hit the absorption bands for chlorophyll a and b, plus some other minor signaling bands that some plants use as regulators. The grow light looks purple and the plants look black because they reflect very little red or blue light.
Years ago I wrote some software to compare a vast number of different high-output LED’s for grow lights I was building, so I dug into it pretty deeply.
Long term, the most important thing in grow lights is simple photonic efficiency in the specific chlorophyll bands. Higher efficiency also means less waste heat, and thus smaller heat sinks and heat rejection equipment.
Coupled with more efficient solar arrays, we’re not far from the point where solar cells and LED lighting would be more efficient than greenhouse windows for growing plants in deep space, on a square-meter basis. They are already be far superior to windows if you consider what it takes to design, install, launch, and support large windows in a human occupied pressure vessel. They also decouple the light collection area from the physical layout of the space station, and allow the amount of greenhouse area to expand simply by adding more solar cells, as opposed to designing and building a bigger ship with more windows.
Why do the rare-earths sound like fictitious chemical elements from a movie script?
“The gadolinium levels are off the charts!”
” a new approach to making LEDs that uses a rare earth ion”
Wonderful! What could possibly go wrong? Can you get this anywhere other than China?
Sure. It’s Europium. It comes from Europe.
That was a Final Jeopardy question last week, and the reigning champion got it. I think the question was something like “This element is mined in Africa and Asia, but not in the continent it was named for.” The other two guessed Americium.
:frystare.jpg:
If your 4k monitor (8 megapixels) has 24 megapixels because they only need LED per pixel, you still need a graphics card that has three times as much memory among other things to drive it at the higher resolution (call it 7k because you get squareroot of 3 times as much pixels width with single-LED pixels). I think it’s more useful for VR where tripling the number of megapixels on a vive pro’s 2 megapixels per eye could go up to 3.5 megapixels per eye with the same LED count and still be driven by the same graphics card to run a 4k monitor.
I’ve seen commentary in other places that the usefulness in VR would likely come from more densely packing the pixels and eliminating the “screen door” effect of having your eyes so close to the screen.