LED TECHNOLOGIES SALES MANAGER
LED products are gaining more and more place in our daily lives in different applications. General lighting, on the other hand, appears as the first application area that comes to our mind since it is “constantly in front of our eyes”. LED lighting technologies bring advantages such as small size, more controllability, spectral flexibility and high product efficiency that the previous technologies lacked. The forecasts in the sector are that 48 percent of lighting sales in 2020 and 84 percent in 2030 will consist of LED products. Apart from general lighting, there are other opportunities offered by the light supplied by LEDs. Many lighting designers are also working on how to use the advantages of LEDs in different areas. Although some of these applications are becoming widespread faster than others, each of them offers new business opportunities for lighting manufacturers who want to differentiate from their competitors. The main applications, at this point, are agricultural lighting, visible light communication, health and stockfarming.
Agricultural Lighting
Photosynthesis, the process by which the plants convert carbon dioxide and water into energy and oxygen, requires chlorophyll pigments to absorb light. Although this light traditionally comes from the Sun, there are many reasons why electric lighting for garden agriculture should also be taken into consideration. The impact of carbon-release caused by transporting the food over long distances on the environment, increasing globalization in food production, political conflicts between countries and natural disasters in different parts of the world are some of the factors that undermine food security. Therefore, the ability to grow plants in smaller areas outside conventional climate zones and agricultural areas has the potential to reduce both the energy consumed for transportation and the risk of food shortages that may occur due to global events.
Visible Light Communication
Visible Light Communication (VLC) is the term used for the communication technology, in which the visible light instead of radio frequencies is used for data transmission. Since the light intensity is used as an information transfer tool in this technology, the need for lighting and the need for information transfer can be met at the same time. This, in turn, can create new business opportunities for manufacturers by increasing the functionality of the lighting produced by lighting fixture manufacturers.
Health
Light therapy is actually a method that has been implemented for many years for treatments such as healing wounds, eliminating skin problems and reducing pain. While lasers have been preferred for light therapy until recent years due to the sensitivity of the desired application-specific wavelength and stable power output requirements, the use of LED products in this field has also started to increase rapidly with the development of new LED production technologies. A wide range of planar LED-based systems, compared to a laser source,
offers wide planar sequences, thus can be applied hands-free to a larger area of the body from a single point, which is not possible with the current laser technologies. Another advantage of the LEDs is that numerous different cell types can be targeted simultaneously for different treatments.
Stockfarming
Lighting also has an important impact on the development of livestock animals. For example, it has been found that the amount of milk produced by cows increases during longer periods of exposure to light, and the chickens, cattle and sheep grow faster. Although, it remains a matter of debate how long and at what level the animals should be exposed to light. At this point, the LED Lighting stands out as the best choice in terms of increasing the living comfort of livestock animals with dimming sensitivity, color flexibility and high controllability, which is not possible with old bulb technologies such as fluorescent and incandescent lamps.
