Gallery of Lights
The Site => General discussion => Topic started by: bryantm3 on November 13, 2012, 07:29:30 PM
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someone recently commented on a picture and said that there were pulse start mercury vapour bulbs. the picture seemed to be of a flood light type configuration however, rather than the usual bulbs. does anyone know if these bulbs are actually more efficient, or at least as efficient, as their metal halide counterparts?
in addition, has anyone tried to create ceramic mercury vapour bulbs? imagine the efficiency of CMH with the long-lasting nature of MV. i'm surprised no one has thought of this.
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Yeah eye (iwasaki) lighting makes them they're just a MV without a probe in the arctube
Ceramic MV would be great! Probably would allow higher pressure mercury with greater efficiency and slightly better color rendering
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Even though it's an old topic I'll leave a comment on this; as an avid lamp-spectra enthusiast, I know quite a bit about lamp formulations.
ALL metal-halide lamps, ceramic or the classic type, including the xenon fired car headlights, contain mercury (Hg). It's an arc starter and a buffer. This is also why it's used in HPS lamps. Not used in low-pressure-sodium (neon is used).
Hg is the original ingredient (Clear Hg lamps from ~1935 to 1950), but over the decades, in order to BOTH increase the efficacy and CRI (color-rendering-index), other light-emmiting materials were added, such as phosphors on the envelopes or metal compounds in the arc tube.
Ceramic metal-halide lamps are essentially mercury lamps,.. but 60 years of added development! Remember that Hg spectra are simply emission line spectra (particularly in the UV). So the added phosphors and halides (Thallium, Sodium) and rare earth metals (dysprosium, holmium, thulium) account for the significant continuum radiation and added strong visible lines (like the sodium D-line ~589nm, in the deep yellow) leading to the high CRI AND greater (2x at least) efficacy.
So no-one or company will attemp to go backwards to create a CMV (ceramic mercury vapor) because it's already been done. Get a cheap diffraction grating (ebay) to identify the lamps. It's fun to look at all the variety of lamp spectra available on any modern city.
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Quick question, what is the restrike time on a PS MV? I ask because PS technology took quartz metal halides from a restrike of 15-20 minutes down to 3-6 minutes. MV lamps restrike in about 3-10 minutes, so does that mean a PS MV lamp would restrike in about a minute like an HPS lamp? That would be cool if so ;D
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I have one of the EYE MoonPulse PS MV lamps, and while the strike & warmup time is no different than a standard MV, the restrike is indeed about a minute.
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id definetly be intreasted in a ceramic MV if one ever existed.
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I have one of the EYE MoonPulse PS MV lamps, and while the strike & warmup time is no different than a standard MV, the restrike is indeed about a minute.
One more reason not to ban MV lamp ;D :MV:
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The MH's are indeed the successors of the MV, but the mercury function there had shifted from an active light generating component to "just" a buffer with quite limited contribution to the radiated output. So from that perspective, all HID's are the same (LPS isn't technically an HID, only marketing wise they are listed along HID's, just because they share their use in the same end applications)
By the way using a ceramic arctube for a pure MV won't make any sense: The ceramic endures way higher temperatures than the quartz ("classic" material for an MV), but does not endure as high pressure.
So in fact a ceramic tube MV would actually perform way worse than the quartz one, just because the quartz concept is able to attain higher operating pressure.
The ceramis MH have higher efficacy (compare to quartz ones) not because of the higher pressure, but because the higher thermal robustness allows the use of other, more efficient light emitting elements, which need higher temperatures to evaporate (or were way too much aggressive towards quartz).