The new energy saving bulbs may soon have competition in the form of an ageing technology – incandescent light bulbs. Scientists from MIT have developed a new kind of incandescent light bulb that utilizes modern science to boost its efficiency – almost matching that of commercial LED bulbs.
The age old incandescent light bulbs are basically inefficient pieces of equipment. Their design makes them so. They basically work by sucking electricity through a thin tungsten filament, the electrical resistance of which causes its temperature to sky-rocket to more than 5,000 degree Fahrenheit. At such ridiculously high temperatures the filament starts to glow, giving off light! And what is the by-product of generating light in this manner – heat – lots and lots of heat in the form infrared radiation. In fact, a normal incandescent bulb only uses 2% of the electricity it takes to turn into light. And in comparison, an LED light bulb manages to bring about light from between 5 to 15%.
But all that is about to change as a devoted team from MIT have been successful in developing a new kind of incandescent bulb that uses a kind of ‘nano-scale mirror’ to make greater use of the wasted infrared emissions. The team has been able to develop a new kind of what it refers to as photonic crystals – materials that allow light in the visible spectrum to pass straight through, while reflecting most of the infrared back to the filament. Hence energy from the infrared radiation is absorbed and gets re-emitted once more, but some of it in the form of visible light. This back-and-forth continues to help bring about a significant increase in efficiency.
The researchers claimed that the process wasn’t simple and straight forward as it sounded though. First of all the team had to make the special photonic crystals, specially turned to allow transmissions of visible light and reflection of infrared. That required layering 90 nano-scale layers of tantalum oxide and silicon dioxide on top of each other. The team then had to redecorate the filament, creating a significantly larger surface area which will be capable of absorbing the reflected radiation.
After all this hard work, the new bulb is able to convert more than 6.6% of the electricity into light. That is more than 3 times than a regular incandescent bulb and much better than the least efficient of LED bulbs that are available in the market.
The team from MIT is very optimistic that with more research, the efficiency can easily be boosted to as much as 40%.
The research was published in Nature Nonotechnology.
Benzamin H
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