In the business of manufacturing LED lighting equipment for outdoor applications such as street and tunnel lighting, stadiums and architectural lighting, the optical power budget is the key metric: how much light does a luminaire have to throw out? And how many LEDs are required to hit this optical power budget?
This metric underlines the significance of a recent announcement from Lumileds about its popular LUXEON HL2X family of domed, directional high-power emitters. Lumileds has extended the family with new parts that offer higher flux in the same industry-standard, 3.5 mm x 3.5 mm three-stripe footprint as before.
Higher brightness from the same board area: this means that lighting manufacturers can hit their optical power budget with fewer LEDs. As a result, they benefit from:
- A lower bill-of-materials cost
- Freedom to reduce the size of the luminaire
The higher flux options are available in a series of 18 new LUXEON HL2X parts, extending the existing family of products. For instance, the new LUXEON HL2X 4000K/70 CRI part offers typical luminous flux of 355 lm at a drive current of 700 mA, up from 343 lm in the previous generation of HL2X products, while efficacy is up to 179 lm/W. Both efficacy and flux are hot-tested at a junction temperature of 85°C.
The LUXEON HL2X LEDs are available in configurations to meet all application requirements, including CCT values from 1800 K to 6500 K, and CRI of 70, 80 or 90.
These LEDs have become extremely popular in outdoor and industrial lighting applications because of their combination of reliability and quality of light. For instance, lumen maintenance has been measured at higher than 99% after 17,000 hours’ operation at 105°C. Color stability is also outstanding, showing color shift of just 0.002 after 17,000 hours, far inside the threshold of 0.007 set by the DesignLights Consortium (DLC) standard. Combined with excellent color-over-angle uniformity, these features of the HL2X mean that manufacturers of outdoor lighting can migrate to higher flux while maintaining high confidence in the quality of light emitted by the luminaire.
The new, improved LUXEON HL2X parts are not the only results of product development at Lumileds – the high-power LUXEON 5050 LEDs are improved as well, featuring a new higher ESD rating of 8 kV. (Existing 2 kV-rated parts will continue to be available.)
For manufacturers of high-quality outdoor and industrial lighting products, the Lumileds LUXEON portfolio continues to be a trusted home of high-quality and reliable products.