Measurement challenges for

Energy Efficient Lighting

Paul Miller and Simon Hall,
Optical Measurement Group, Engineering Measurement Division

Intro: Lighting consumes 20% of electricity generated
worldwide. This is 1,900 million tonnes of CO2 per
year. New lighting technologies promise to save 75%
of this energy. In Europe alone this could save energy
equivalent to the output from 20 power stations by 2020.
Metrology will play a crucial role in realising these energy
savings, through ensuring user acceptance, by providing
the means to measure and test products to traceable
standards, and prevent consumer disillusionment with
poor quality products.
Aim: By setting the standards NPL enables new lighting
manufacturers to deliver better lighting through improved
measurement. Lighting manufacturers and lighting
designers must be able to justify claims of efficiency and
colour rendering, and especially changes in these over
the long lifetime projected for solid state lighting. NPL
is supporting new energy efficient lighting technologies
by providing unique measurement facilities in order to
measure the quantity and quality of light.

Optical and preference. From a measurement standpoint the

On 1 September 2010, EU legislation came into force
requiring light output to be labelled in terms of lumens,
instead of electrical input watts, in order to enable a fair
comparison of lighting technologies. The lumen is a
measure of visible light produced by the lamp, whereas
the watt measures the electrical power supplied. The
lumen is derived from the SI unit for luminous intensity
- the candela, which is the only SI unit defined with
reference to human perception.
Work to study the human visual response to light was carried out
at NPL in the 1920s, leading to the definition of the V(λ)
function.
The spectral output of LED based lighting is
different compared to traditional light sources,
such as incandescent light bulbs, which
leads to changes in human perception
spectral differences can lead to spectral mismatch
errors of up to 20% for a white light source when using
photometers calibrated against incandescent reference
standards.
NPL has developed a unique capability, the NPL
Goniospectroradiometer, to measure the spatial and
spectral distribution of lighting. This overcomes
spectral mismatch errors and additional errors where
the spectral output of LED lighting (defined in terms
of its correlated colour temperature) can vary by as much as 20% as a
function of angle. The spectral and spatial measurement can then
be used to calculate the photometric and colour uniformity
of light sources, which better enables lighting
manufacturers to demonstrate the quality
of lighting.

Thermal Electrical
The properties of LED lighting are In order to demonstrate energy
sensitive to changes in junction efficiency, traceable measurements
temperature. Changes in light of input electrical power are
output, spectral output and lifetime required. LED lighting typically
are observed due to junction operates under direct current and
temperature changes, which can low voltage conditions, which require
be caused by ambient temperature, driver circuits to convert the supplied
and changes to drive current. Direct mains AC power. Dimming of lighting
measurement of junction temperature and the use of pulse width modulation
is often complex or not possible can lead to poor power quality, which
(since the junction is not accessible in can impact the electrical grid supply
the light fitting), so new methods are system. The need to characterise the
being developed to measure junction quality of the electrical power is being
temperature and to correlate these with addressed by NPL as part of the European
indirect methods, such as spectral output and Metrology Research Programme “Metrology
thermal imaging. for Solid State Lighting (SSL)” project with
14 other European countries. This project
In collaboration with the Advanced Technology
has a stated aim of providing a measurement
Institute,
capability and
University of
traceability whose
Surrey, NPL
uncertainty for
has developed
electrical power
resonant
measurement for
absorption
SSL products is
and electrical
smaller than 0.1%.
techniques for
measuring the
heat generated in
LEDs. These novel
www.scientoid.com/downloads/perf_diff.pdf
techniques for
measuring heating in semiconductor devices will also
help to address efficiency degradation in the LEDs, the
so-called green droop, leading to new light sources and
greater energy savings. Conclusion
Lighting is one of the lowest hanging fruits
in energy and carbon reduction. Better
measurement will lead to lighting technologies
that exceed expectation and enable the benefits
of energy efficient lighting to be harvested.