‘The future is bright’, says Peter Bracke, coordinator of the Groen Licht Vlaanderen Lighting Cluster of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) and partner in the SSL-erate project. ‘The efficiency of LED systems is great and the costs are steadily coming down’, he notices. This means that Solid State Lighting (SSL) can contribute to sustainability: to planet, e.g., by reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions, and to profit, e.g., through energy efficiency and longer lifetimes and higher reliability of products. ‘The real value of SSL’, however, Peter argues, ‘is in the people pillar of sustainability: in the positive effects that light can have on people’s comfort, alertness, mood, social behaviour and healthy sleep’.
Visits to the research facilities of KU Leuven for hands-on experiences and in-depth discussions
Peter organized a series of events on Thursday 5 and Friday 6 November. On Thursday there were presentations and demonstrations by research groups of Leuven, on various topics, ranging from the non-visual aspects of light, methods to evaluate people’s perceptions of color rendition, glare and flicker of LED lighting systems—and more. It was a great opportunity to gain hands-on experience with various aspects of SSL and to have in-depth discussions with researchers of KU Leuven. Peter presented in Dutch the latest research findings on the effects of light on health and wellbeing.
On Friday there were presentations of researchers of both Leuven and the SSL-erate project: Peter Bracke talked about the aim to accelerate LED lighting; Gertjan Scheir (KU Leuven) spoke about visual comfort and the development of a valid glare metric; Kevin Smet (KU Leuven) spoke about color rendering and the development of better color samples; Marc Fontoynont (Aalborg University, partner in the SSL-erate project,) spoke about the status and potential of virtual demo’s for innovative lighting design; and Katharina Wulff (University of Oxford, partner in the SSL-erate project) discussed methods to verify the effects of light on people’s wellbeing and health.
Presentations of KU Leuven and the SSL-erate project on the state-of-the-art in LED lighting
These two days provided an excellent overview of the state-of-the-art in Solid State Lighting: how human-centric lighting can contribute to people’s performance, health and wellbeing; and several challenges that need to be faced and solved in order to accelerate adoption, e.g., color rendition, glare, flicker, dimming, interoperability, serviceability and new form factors.
Overall, these days involved 167 people, from industry and academia and from potential customers, and will help them to collaborate in the development of innovative LED lighting systems.