An article featuring LED Light Safety and the importance of being IEC 62471 compliant written by Matt Pinter, Director of Engineering at Smart Vision Lights has been published in Quality Magazine’s January 2015 issue.
White LEDs are widely used in industrial and architectural lighting applications.
Manufacturers of products containing light-emitting diodes (LEDs) know that governments around the world require their products to be tested to guarantee that ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR) light output does not exceed safety levels outlined in international standard IEC 62471. What they may not know is that products bearing CE, UL, CCC, or other national marks that do not have documented proof of IEC 62471 compliance can be confiscated—even from customer installations—excluded from sale within the country, and the manufacturer fined.
Until the last decade, LED lights emitted powers that were too low to raise safety concerns. OEMs that used lasers, coherent light sources offering significantly more power, were accustomed to testing, documenting, and certifying their devices to a specific hazard category that dictated safe work practices for nearby technicians. But in the case of LEDs, an internationally recognized safety standard based on wavelength and emission power wasn’t required.
Then came the telecom boom of the 1990s, which lead to significant development in LED solid-state architectures with an eye towards driver fiber lasers used in optical fiber communications. As a result, LEDs benefited from exponential performance improvements. As power levels increased, more lighting applications turned to solid state illumination thanks to better efficiency and lower operating costs of LEDs compared to incandescent and gas-discharge lamps. Also, because LED lights are made of a monolithic semiconductor material, they are inherently more rugged than filament- or ballast-based lights, which have endeared LED lights to industrial markets where up-time is a primary concern. Finally, LED lights also can be designed to generate virtually any wavelength or color of light from the UV through the IR spectral band.
Read the full Are Your LED Lights Safe? article on Quality Magazines website.