Development trend of LED street lighting

If we conduct an in-depth study of the LED lighting market segment, we can find that its penetration rate is not only increasing in indoor lighting such as homes and buildings, but also in some outdoor lighting and professional lighting. The growth momentum of LED lighting is also very strong. LED street lighting is one of the most typical application scenarios. The inherent advantages of LED street lighting Traditional street lighting usually uses high-pressure sodium lamps (HPS) or mercury vapor lamps (MH), and the technology is very mature. However, compared with these two, LED lighting has many inherent advantages.

Low energy consumption

Research data show that street lamp energy consumption generally accounts for about 30% of the city's municipal energy budget. The low energy consumption characteristics of LED lighting can just reduce this high energy expenditure. It is estimated that after countries around the world switch to LED street lamps, the world's carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by millions of tons.

Good directionality

Traditional road lighting sources lack directionality. On the one hand, this will lead to insufficient lighting brightness in key areas, and on the other hand, because the light is scattered to areas that do not need lighting, it will also cause light pollution. The excellent directionality of LED lights can overcome this problem, illuminating limited spaces without affecting surrounding areas.

High light efficiency

Compared to high-pressure sodium or mercury vapor bulbs, LED light sources have higher light efficiency, that is, they can produce more lumens per unit power consumption. In addition, LEDs have much lower infrared (IR) and ultraviolet (UV) light content than other traditional light sources, which means that it produces less waste heat and much less thermal stress on the entire lamp.

Long life

As we all know, LEDs have high operating junction temperatures and extremely long life. It is estimated that the service life of LED lighting arrays in road lighting can reach 50,000 hours or more, which is 2-4 times that of high-pressure sodium lamps or metal halide lamps. Since there is no need for frequent replacement, the resulting savings in related materials and maintenance costs are attractive.

More environmentally friendly

High-pressure sodium lamps and mercury vapor lamps contain toxic substances (such as mercury), which require special disposal procedures when they are discarded, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and not environmentally friendly; while metal halide lamps sometimes explode. And LED lamps do not have the above problems, which are more environmentally friendly and safer when used.

Strong controllability

The driving method of LED street lights is to convert AC/DC and DC/DC power supplies into the voltage and current required by LED supply. Although this makes the circuit more complex, it is more controllable than traditional AC lighting technology, has a faster response speed, can achieve fast switching, dimming and other effects, and the color temperature of LED can be accurately controlled by the selection of components. Improving controllability is precisely the key factor in realizing automated intelligent lighting, so LED street lights are also indispensable in the list of smart city construction.

Two major trends in LED street lighting

Because of the above outstanding advantages, the large-scale application of LED lighting in urban road lighting has become a trend. However, it is worth noting that this technology upgrade is not a simple "replacement" of traditional lighting equipment, but a systematic change. In the process of this change, two trends worthy of attention have emerged.

One of the development trends is intelligence. As mentioned earlier, LED lights are highly controllable, which provides the possibility of creating an automated intelligent street light system around it. In this street light system, accurate algorithms and even machine learning capabilities based on environmental information (for example, ambient light, the survival and activities of people or things, etc.) can realize the automatic adjustment of street light switches and brightness without human intervention, and the benefits it produces are obvious to all. As a network covering urban infrastructure, street lamps themselves may become more intelligent edge nodes of the Internet of Things. In the future, it is possible to add more functions to LED street lamps (for example, meteorological and air quality monitoring), making them play a more important role in smart cities.

But we can also see that this intelligent development trend will also pose new challenges to the design of LED street lamps - the system will be more complex. This determines that under the condition of limited space of street lamp shape, it must include functions such as lighting, driving, sensing, control, communication and more extended functions. To meet this challenge, standardization is the only way out and it is also another important development trend of LED street lamp lighting. The advantage of standardization is that it can enable more technology suppliers' functional modules to be seamlessly integrated with LED street lamps, thereby greatly improving the scalability of the system.

Intelligence promotes standardization, and standardization promotes the continuous deepening of intelligence - the two trends interact and promote the continuous evolution of LED street lamp lighting technology and applications.