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While enjoying a tasty cajun filet biscuit at Bojangles on Saturday morning, Jason suggested I make some materials themed posts on nadsat similar to how he posts about his area of education on his site. This conviently coincided with an upgrade I was doing to the headlights on my Accord in which I found some pretty cool new bulbs.

Your basic incadesent lightbulb gives off about 90% of its energy in the form of heat. This heat is emited in the form of infrared radiation. So what? Light bulbs get hot, everyone knows this. What if you could use this heat to generate more light? You could get more light out of the bulb without increasing the wattage.

General Electric figured out a way to do this and patented the concept in 2000. They call the technology, Halogen Infrared. Basically, using a special IR reflective coating and a spherical shape to the bulb, the infrared radiation can be redirected back to the filament making it burn hotter and thus producing more light. The benefits: more light, same wattage, and less heat. Using an IR reflective coating is nothing new, the key for GE was they figured out to keep the costs down and use the coating to its maximum optical efficiency.

Kudos to GE for figuring this out and giving me better lighting for my car (even though my bulbs were technically manufactured by Toshiba, it’s still GE technology)!

(Thanks to Daniel Stern Lighnting for pointing me in the right direction and recommending these bulbs to me.)

Ref:

http://www.gelighting.com/na/business_lighting/faqs/halogen.htm

http://www.danielsternlighting.com

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