Other Sources

There seems to have been a lot of focus on small incadescent light sources run by 12 V batteries. The proper application for these in a living situation is reading lamps and task lights. Their effect on biological life support is trivial because if their inefficiency, short life, and disposability. The focus for biological life support lighting should shift to high efficiency, long life, rebuildable light sources.

There is some very interesting work being done at NASA. They are testing the use of LED's as a light source for photosynthesis. The gist of it is, you can do photosynthesis with just red LEDs, but not very efficiently. Their data show that by adding just 10% blue light photosynthetic efficiency is greatly increased, even over the results achieved by their white light baseline. The data I've seen on blue LEDs shows that they are not suitable for our application. They are very inefficient and costly. Conventional fluorescent lamps can be expected to last no longer that two years. I do not recommend the use of conventional flourescents, they are fragile and as any consumable light source they are not manufactured in such a way as to make repair or rebuilding practical. The only suitable light source I am aware of that is long lasting, routinely rebuildable, and can be made to be efficient, is the luminous tube, better known as the neon light.

Offered by Steve