14 DAY TRIAL // Experts from Queen's University have devised a new method of creating more energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL), a praised alternative to conventional, incandescent ones. According to the scientists, their invention would also allow for a more fine tunning of the bulb's “dim” factor. Legislation in Europe has it that CFL will become the only allowed form of lighting in public homes over the next years, in that incandescent light bulbs will be banned from being sold to the public.
“Consumer-grade CFL need to be compact and inexpensive. Until now, the complicated circuitry needed to power these bulbs most efficiently has been too large and too costly for consumer-grade compact fluorescents. In its current form, the household CFL takes away the very benefit to the power grid that it was supposed to provide,” electronic power supplies world expert Praveen Jain, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and also the chair in Power Electronics at Canada Research, explains.
Two of the main problems that plague the production of CFL are their inability to work with dimmers, the knobs that regulate how much light a bulb produces, and also the fact that they only consume a part of the power they draw from the grid. The latter issue implies that a large part of the consumed energy is wasted, because it is not transformed into visible light. This is a major obstacle for CFL, because, if allowed to persist, it would render useless the very purpose for which they were designed, namely to help save electrical energy.
“This is an excellent example of university research providing an innovative solution well in advance of a potential market problem. The key to providing usable innovation is understanding the problems of existing technology and finding elegant solutions. Here we have a motivated researcher who saw a key problem and delivered the solution to an industry in need, in time to make a difference,” John Molloy, the president and CEO of PARTEQ, the technology-transfer office for QU, says.
The actual solution to the problems has been very simple, PhD candidate John Lam, who has worked with Dr. Jain on the research, shares. He has created a simplified diagram for CFL, one that does not require as much circuitry as the older ones do. “We were able to develop a more power-efficient, dimmable and cost-effective CFL technology that can truly replace the power-hungry incandescent light bulbs. This makes it very attractive to the consumer market,” Jain explains.