The Trend of LED indoor and outdoor lighting

As the market penetration of LED luminaires increases year on year, luminaire manufacturers are focusing their new product development on LED luminaires.

LED as a new technology has led to the development of various technologies related to it, and at the same time, various unexpected problems have gradually arisen in the development, and new market players have taken advantage of their original strengths to redefine the market.

Therefore, when doing LED lighting products, we need to grasp the product trends of LED lighting, understand and select new technologies, solve problems and quickly adapt to the market.

I. Trends in indoor and outdoor products

LED lamps and lanterns can be distinguished into indoor lamps and lanterns and outdoor lamps and lanterns according to the actual application. LED technology was first popularised in outdoor lamps and lanterns, and due to its low energy consumption, it is seen as an ideal alternative to traditional street lamps that consume huge amounts of energy. Coupled with its rich colours, it is widely used in landscape lighting. With the continuous improvement of LED light efficiency, the maturity of heat dissipation technology and the advancement of drive technology, it is only in the last two years that they have started to make their mark on indoor luminaires.

1、Outdoor lighting products

For LED outdoor products, there are roughly street lamps and linear lamps in the domestic market. Among them, LED street light fixtures are the most technically demanding products. Batwing light distribution, lightning protection, high-power products, heat dissipation, drive power, waterproof and dustproof, high and low temperature application environment, the main and secondary roads of the way to lay lights, etc. all determine the quality of the product.

The general production method of domestic manufacturers is a dense row of high power and high luminous efficiency LEDs with an outsourced LED drive power supply. Most of the early products advertise how high their luminous efficiency is and how long the LED life is. But in fact the life of the LED does not represent the life of the luminaire, and high luminous efficiency does not mean energy saving. In practice, we often encounter light not long, LED street light lighting effect down a lot or even out of the phenomenon. As the light distribution of LED lamps and lanterns directly determines the actual application of the cloth lamp, we should use the value of W/km to measure the energy-saving level of the product.

Due to the high brightness of LEDs, it makes people vulnerable to street light glare during driving, which should be avoided in the actual design. One of the considerations in choosing sodium lamps as the ideal street light source in the early days was that the double yellow line of yellow light is sensitive to the human eye and has a strong ability to transmit fog. However, LED products are now available in a wide range of colour temperatures from low to high, so that the light and dark visual environment of the human eye can be combined to more correctly select the right colour temperature.

In addition to ensuring that there is no light pollution caused by uplighting, there are intelligent lighting control functions to reduce consumption in the late night when traffic is idle, which can further achieve the effect of energy saving and emission reduction.

Linear lights can be broadly divided into two categories: landscape lighting and application lighting. Wall washing is the most common effect in applied lighting. Important factors to be considered for wall wash lighting are the distance of the wash wall, the shortest distance from the wall for installation, the uniformity of the wash wall, and the dark area of the wash wall.

Due to the harshness of LEDs, homeowners often require anti-glare covers for such luminaires, but this will re-impact the light distribution and is a new challenge for such luminaires. the most important function of LED linear lights is dimming to produce different colour variations and create different ambient scenes. The most common dimming colour is RGB dimming, but now there are also dimming trends such as RGBW, WNC and even special colours.

From the point of view of dimming protocols, domestic is generally dominated by the DMX method. Dimming system should be the main consideration of the system reliability, stability, DMX controller maintainability. It is best to have RDM as well as automatic addressing methods, which can quickly and accurately locate the lamps. As LED linear lights are most closely integrated with the building structure, on-site construction and installation is the biggest challenge, both with the electrical and also with the glass curtain wall and other structures. The simplicity of the installation and the compactness of the structure are the biggest design challenges.

In terms of electrical connections, the common method used in China is the “hands-on” connection method. The installation should be done in small grooves without size restrictions. From the point of view of appearance, designers are reluctant to see the PCB board inside the luminaire and the components on it, and sometimes they do not even want to see the granularity of the LEDs, which poses a great challenge for the selection of the translucent cover.

2、Indoor lighting products

Indoor products are closer to people’s lives and have huge market potential. The main ones sold in the domestic market are LED downlights, spotlights and string lights.

The early downlights and spotlights were basically single-particle LEDs, designed with different circuit boards to suit different powers and calibres. Such products have three main problems: First, due to the lack of mastery of various LED technologies, the failure rate of the product is high, once the failure of the entire product needs to be replaced, rather than as long as the traditional products can replace the light source, so that the maintenance costs are very high; Second, the light emitted by the LED is not the uniform circular spot needed by the designer, but the superposition of a number of spots; Third, different LED particle combinations and apertures require new structural, optical and thermal design, resulting in a corresponding increase in design costs, mould costs, storage costs and manufacturing costs.

In order to solve the above problems, there are now some trends in LED products. For example, for traditional QRCBC and QR111 halogen luminaires, the use of LED light sources of the same size allows the use of the original transformer and lamp body, but also allows the replacement of the light source in the same way as traditional luminaires.

There is also a trend to use COB packages and ZHAGA compliant light engines to standardise LED light sources, increasing luminous flux and reducing design and manufacturing costs while keeping dimensions the same. For spotlights, ultra-narrow beam angles are one of the advantages that reflect the design and manufacture of luminaire manufacturers.

Dimming is also a development trend for luminaire products. Domestic indoor products are mainly dimmable from 0 to 10V, and there is still relatively little in the way of DALI dimming, which is more mature in international applications. Because of the realisation that LED dimming may produce the problem of colour drift, dimming requirements are no longer simply adjusting the voltage to adjust the current, and PWM-based. However, this will also bring EMC and other issues need to be further addressed.

In the choice of colour temperature, the domestic tendency is 2700K and lower colour temperature brings a warm and comfortable feeling. In addition, special attention has to be paid to photobiological safety for indoor products, as well as the design of different filters to achieve different light distribution effects.

The early days of string products were dominated by flexible strips. A current trend is to place them in aluminium recesses in order to integrate them into the structure. They are often fitted with mixing plates to soften the light and give it a grainy feel. As these strips are designed to be easily cut to different lengths, the form of series connection is in fact parallel, and with the use of chip resistors for current limiting, the actual length of the light string can be extended is limited.

There is also a trend for flexible circuit boards to be predominantly yellow in colour to better mix low colour temperature light. There is also a class of flat panel lights, but the current market is more concerned about the uniformity of its light, generally do decorative lighting use.

Second, grasp the trend of LED lamps and lanterns design

LED products are actually products of light, light systems. This has three layers of meaning.

First, the light emitted from the product should meet the requirements of the owner, designer and building, both qualitative and quantitative to meet. In reality, there are often sales staff and designers who communicate with the power as the basis for measuring the amount of light emitted, thinking that improving the amount of light emitted should increase the power, which is actually a serious misunderstanding.

Secondly, as a product that can sell well, it should meet the requirements of owners and designers in terms of appearance, quality and performance.

Third, from a system perspective, companies should be able to give systematic support to users from the application, product, construction, dimming and service, giving users a professional, full range of application products for the whole package.

The emergence of LED technology has greatly enriched the lighting products, lamps and lanterns are no longer a lamp head a light source will be able to hit the world, smaller, thinner, more functional products in the foreign market day by day. LED as a product that requires a variety of knowledge, design is a product and the soul of the enterprise, so to grasp the trend of product design, rather than rely on low-cost marketing, regardless of the quality of the market strategy.