Lighting company Vu1 (formerly Telegen) announced a new technology for low power lighting this week: Electron Stimulated Luminescence™. The new technology is remarkably similar in principle to the old cathode ray tube TVs. The bulb generates a stream of electrons that excite a phosphor coating on the inside of the bulb’s glass. That has the effect of making the entire surface of the bulb glow.

Incandescent bulbs run current through a filament, heating it to produce. CFLs send current through mercury vapour to generate UV light which excites the phosphor coating on the inside of the glass. LEDs use special semiconductors which emit light when excited electrically. Vu1’s technology does away with the filament (which is the achilles heel of the incandescent bulb, resulting in the eventual failure of the bulb when all the heating and cooling causes the filament to break), which should improve the lifetime.

Advantages
The bulbs look like regular incandescent ones. Indeed, the company claims that they source them from existing bulb glass manufacturers. They also claim that the new bulbs generate similar quality light as an incandescent, but do so at a fraction of the power. Given that they are using a phosphor coating on the glass though, the same technology as CFLs employ, I’m not sure how they can claim a difference in the light quality between their bulbs and CFLs (many of which now generate warmer light than their predecessors did).

When compared to CFLs, they are fully dimmable and contain no mercury (a concern for CFLs since they require special handling if broken and must be disposed of carefully). They also start instantly, rather than taking a minute or so to build up to full brightness.

They should also be cheaper than LED technology since they are much simpler to manufacture. CleanTechnica reports the pricing will be around $12/bulb - about the same as dimmable CFLs. That seems too high to me, but it is new technology so one can hope that the price will come down as the volume increases.

Tags: bulb, cfl, esl, led, vu1

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