ISS To Get L.E.D.s

Rampant drug use, grumpiness, depression and minor to serious workplace mistakes, sounds like a business on the ropes and certainly is a recipe for disaster.  This scenario is one that no one would ascribe to the ISS, but in fact this is the very process going on 100+ miles over our heads.   

Many factors are at play here.  Noise, lack of privacy and pervasive florescent lighting have lead to fatigue which leads many of the crew members to resort to sleeping pills to help them sleep.  

NASA has acknowledged the problem and one step the have begun to implement is lighting that can simulate night and day.  This will be accomplished by changing out the pervasive florescent fixtures with LED units that can brighten and darken as well as change colors.  

From the DVICE article:

• By 2016, NASA will have installed new arrays of LED lights in place of the fluorescent lights in the U.S. areas of the station. These arrays will be programmed to wake the crew up with blueish light, project whiteish light during the day, and then send everyone to bed with reddish light in the evenings.

This system has been proven on Earth and it begs the question since day and night lighting is so pervasive in science fiction, one has to wonder why NASA never thought to implement it on the space station?

Fun With LEDs

I know...not science or ...well wait it IS kinda sciency...you find so much fun stuff on the Hack A Day blog...lol anyway, if you are facinated with LEDs like I am than you're going to love this piece from ToddFun.com as he disassembles an LED home bulb. Todd it seems ran into the exact same thing that I think any of us that jumped on the LED bandwagon only to find that many of the early producers shoved whatever they could into whatever they could and called it good enough. Far from the 5000 hours, you were lucky if you got a couple of week! But these bulbs were treasure troves of LEDs and various hardware.

So, this is like the everyman's teardown. If you are a tech, you will find some of the video tedious, but the attention to detail that Todd gives us makes up for it.

So, here is another of my fascinations, electronics...and I think LEDs rule! I hope you find this as much fun as I did 

The ToddFun site can be found here

LED Bulb That is 230% Efficient

You read that right. An MIT research team has shown an LED bulb can actually give off more energy (in light) than it consumes in electricity. Every law about the conservation of energy or thermodynamics that you learned in school just flew out the window. How is this possible?

Well for clarity, lets look at the Gizmodo article:

• (scientists) from MIT posited that while the bulb's energy requirements decrease at an exponential rate (halving the voltage reduces the input power by a factor of four), the lumen output would decrease linearly (halve the voltage and the lumens drop by half as well). This means that at some point, the amount of lumens the bulb is emitting would be more than the amount of energy spent—essentially "free" light.

Still it's enough to make you head spin!  The factors we do have to watch though are that the bulbs are extremely small and the amount of voltage applied is minuscule.   To get an idea, let's look at the article again:

• the team was able to generate 69 picowatts of light from just 30 picowatts of energy. (to get an idea of how small a picowatt is,  a picowatt is 1 trillionth of a watt)

But some of the methods used to boost efficiency is equally amazing.  In this instance, the MIT team boosted the bulb's inherent electrical inefficiency by capturing waste heat from the bulb's atomic lattice!  This cools the device and raises the efficiency.   The really good news is that the methods employed can be applied to the LEDs in use today, making them "cold" bulbs.  Though they would not reach the efficiency of  the MIT's bulb, the bulbs would still be giving off light without any waste heat to rob the bulb's overall efficiency. 

Physics online article here