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Car companies, starting with Volvo last summer, have laid out plans to electrify entire lineups of vehicles. But the fine print makes it clear that the coming decade and beyond will focus not just on massive battery packs powering electric motors, but also on adding a little extra juice to the venerable internal combustion engine.
Increasingly, that juice will arrive in the form of new electrical systems built to a 48-volt standard, instead of the 12-volt systems that have dominated since the 1950s. Simpler than Prius-type drivetrains and less expensive than Tesla-scale battery power, the new electrical architecture both satisfies the demands of cars made more power hungry by their gadget load and enables the use of lower-cost hybrid drive systems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/electric-cars-48-volts.html
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday February 26 2018, @08:01AM (3 children)
Ok, I can't "resist"... you left yourself so wide open with that pun. So I will take you up on it.
Ummm, yes, it IS a current factor. Typically LED's give a helluva lot more light per watt than incandescent will. [cnet.com] Especially lower temperature incandescent like automotive. You will get the same light from 500mA of LED current as you did from 2 Amperes of current to an incandescent.
Not only that, if done right, the LED will easily outlive the car and its owner. No more getting pulled over for burned out tail light.
The only thing that seems to make an LED dim over time is how hard it is driven... ease off a bit and the thing will live longer than you will.
Drive 'em hard and they will fail in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks... and most designers seem to try to make the numbers look better than the competition - and design stuff that does not last very long. Stuff like lumenaires for businesses. They put 'em in and within a year, al lot of the die are, well, dead.
Given the lifetime, more robust connections can be made, which move the tradeoff from ease-of-replacement to reliability. Replacement of an LED tail light assembly could conceivably involve use of a soldering iron and heat shrink - as it the original wiring was crimped in place and sealed by factory automatons. How many times you have run across light bulbs that worked when wiggled because of a corroded connector?
But you are so right... incandescent technologies are nearly completely obsolete. There are very few holdouts where high temperatures and adverse conditions are involved, or spectral requirements of some laboratory devices. I am working toward getting rid of all incandescents in my life, but admittedly the light in the oven is going to remain incandescent for quite some time.
One of the things I really like about LED's is that, between phosphors and physics, I can get darned near any color of light I want. So I do not have to make a spectrum of colors and throw most of it away with filters.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @09:12PM (2 children)
An incandescent oven light is desirable for me, as I bake bread and make yogurt often. A little extra heat in an out of the way place is nice to have.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @10:05PM (1 child)
Huh? The heat produced by an oven light is nothing compared to that produced by the oven's heating elements. An LED light in an oven would be nice, as it would be much whiter and could be brighter than standard oven bulbs. But we don't have other lighting technology that works all that reliably at 500F, so we have to stick with bulbs for now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @07:00AM
He means with the main element off. If his bulb is 40 watts, he's using it as a 40-watt heating element.
We have lighting technology that works much hotter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_lamp [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_arc_lamp [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrargyrum_medium-arc_iodide_lamp [wikipedia.org]
Lots of gas-discharge tubes will work fine. Mix them to obtain the desired color of light.