Dubai Lamp | Hacker News Reader

Dubai Lamp

mea.lighting.philips.com

45 pointsmoonbug18 comments

For context: These are ultra-efficient LED light bulbs that are currently exclusive to the UAE.

LED efficiency is non-linear with increasing power input. LEDs are most efficient at lower currents. The harder an LED is driven, the less marginal increase in light output.

The Dubai Lamp gets higher efficiency by using more LEDs and driving them in the more efficient part of their operating curve. More parts cost, but lower energy costs long-term.

This is complicated. At low current there is no photon generation because all you get is leakage. Then the generation increases with current, while a lot of photons are lost to reflection and recombination and the leakage increases with thermal recombination. As the current increases, the carrier population densities become inverted and then most of the generation is through stimulated emission, which is much more efficient, and the reflections actually help drop the critical current to get to this point. The dream structure would be a very small junction region with high optical and electrical confinement, low defects, and high thermal conductivity. I would expect this to be a SiC wire with a thin strained CVD GaN crystal layer in a Bragg reflector outer shell. Just to be clear I know nothing of the last 15 years of progress.

Why are they exclusive to the UAE? (neither this article, nor the one linked from the HN discussion the other day mention exclusivity). If it was a UAE manufacturer, I could see why, but you'd think Philips would want to sell world-wide.

Is it to their advantage to sell lamps that last much, much longer?

You can be sure light bulbs no matter the type will never reach even 5% of what they could reach if research would focus on longevity instead of controlled failure.

I presume the tech was first developed in tandem for street lighting, and then carried over to household lighting because the government said so.

It's interesting as it is a common management consulting case study. As another comment mentions, most bulbs don't even reach their current full lifespan.

It's a private-public partnership between a government authority and Philips. The government likely has a stake in the license.

Also worse colour temperature and colour quality than some of the lower-efficiency LEDs, I believe (there's a tradeoff there).

This was covered in the original video.

In short, people in Dubai like a cooler color temperature indoors, because the temperature outdoors tends to be hotter. The government is smart enough to recognize this fact, and build it into the exclusive contract they have with Philips.

Thanks, their website was pretty crap at explaining what it is / and how it differs from other lightbulbs.

These have gotten some attention recently probably because of Big Clive's great video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4

Called the german ministry of environment. They weren't even aware, these LEDs exist. One good option would be to move this into legislation. This would be a great addition to the "Ökodesign-Richtlinie" (https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/wirtschaft-konsum/prod...) regulating product design for better sustainability and repairability.

Previous HN discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808959

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808959

Meanwhile, you can buy these now: https://www.swanwicksleep.com/collections/other-swannies-pro...

What does that have to do with the ‘Dubai Lamp’? It's substantially less efficient than a typical LED bulb, and makes no claim about lifetime.

No UV light bleeding.

It's just a bunch of red and green LEDs inside a regular housing..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com