| It would be impossible to excite the sulphur using
traditional electrodes. The sulphur would quickly react with and
destroy all metallic electrodes rendering them useless. The absence
of electrodes allows for a far greater variety of light-generating
substances to be used than those used in traditional lamps.
The design life of the bulb is greater than 60,000 hours. The bulb
emits no electric or magnetic fields. The quality of light reduces
by up to 5% in the first 100 hours of operation and then remains
constant for the next 5 years.
With the exception of fluorescent lamps, the warm-up time of the
sulphur lamp is notably shorter than for all other gas discharge
lamps, even at low ambient temperatures. It reaches 90% of its final
luminous flux within twenty seconds (video), and the lamp can be
restarted less than five minutes after a power cut.
Our first prototype lamps were 1.18 kW units, with a system efficiency
of just over 100 lumens per watt. The first production models were
1.36 kW with an output of 191,000 lumens.
Quality of Light Emitted
The sulphur plasma consists mainly of dimer molecules (S2), which
generate the light through molecular emission. Because this, instead
of atomic emission, is the mechanism of light generation, the emission
spectrum is continuous throughout the visible spectrum.
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