Fipels - The death of fluorescent lighting?
For many years, I have had problems working under fluorescent lighting. The 50Hz (60Hz if you are american) flickering causes me to have very strange headaches, and make me feel dizzy. I have been told by a neurologist that this is due to an atypical form of epilepsy, where a cluster of nerves in my brain goes into spasm when stimulated by flickering light. I have never had an epileptic attack, and probably never will, but I spend most of my life with a feeling like pins and needles in the left side of my head. At my last job, I worked in a small office, and was allowed to turn off the overhead lighting, and use a desk lamp. This improved the situation a lot, and I could get by quite well. For the last year, I have been working in a large, open plan office where it is not possible to turn off the overhead lighting, and my headaches have been pretty bad.
I have been hoping that LED lighting would become more prevalent, and in time would replace the dreaded fluorescent tubes that festoon every modern office building. LED lighting has a much broader spectrum light, and with good rectification should not flicker at all. LED also have the advantage of being made from much environmentally friendlier materials, and don.t contain any mercury gas. All of the mercury for these bulbs is imported from China, but when the bulbs are recycled, the mercury gas is converted to a powder, which under EU law is illegal to export back to China, so it has to be stored indefinitely in an old salt mine in Germany. This is a crazy situation, with expensive and potentially hazardous consequences. LED lighting is efficient, and can be run easily from 12V source rather than 240V, making it easy to install, and they can be put into places that other bulbs could never be used.
Now, scientists have developed a new kind of light source made from polymers embedded with nano particles. These new light strips are called field-induced polymer electroluminescent or Fipel for short. These new devices are flexible, contain no mercury, produce a high quality light, even better than LED and best of all the light is stable with no flickering. As they are made from a type of plastic, they are very durable, and there is no danger of shattering them. Due to the nature of the materials used to build them, Fipel lighting can be adjusted electronically, to be dim-able, and produce light from various parts of the spectrum, allowing for multi coloured or mood lighting.
With any luck this new lighting should make its way into offices and factories over the next year, and people such as myself can work without feeling sick and head achy. Sometimes technology really pays off.
I have been hoping that LED lighting would become more prevalent, and in time would replace the dreaded fluorescent tubes that festoon every modern office building. LED lighting has a much broader spectrum light, and with good rectification should not flicker at all. LED also have the advantage of being made from much environmentally friendlier materials, and don.t contain any mercury gas. All of the mercury for these bulbs is imported from China, but when the bulbs are recycled, the mercury gas is converted to a powder, which under EU law is illegal to export back to China, so it has to be stored indefinitely in an old salt mine in Germany. This is a crazy situation, with expensive and potentially hazardous consequences. LED lighting is efficient, and can be run easily from 12V source rather than 240V, making it easy to install, and they can be put into places that other bulbs could never be used.
Now, scientists have developed a new kind of light source made from polymers embedded with nano particles. These new light strips are called field-induced polymer electroluminescent or Fipel for short. These new devices are flexible, contain no mercury, produce a high quality light, even better than LED and best of all the light is stable with no flickering. As they are made from a type of plastic, they are very durable, and there is no danger of shattering them. Due to the nature of the materials used to build them, Fipel lighting can be adjusted electronically, to be dim-able, and produce light from various parts of the spectrum, allowing for multi coloured or mood lighting.
With any luck this new lighting should make its way into offices and factories over the next year, and people such as myself can work without feeling sick and head achy. Sometimes technology really pays off.
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