Incandescent

From CPFWiki

The incandescent light bulb has been around since the beginning of the 18th century, and is the most widely used form of lighting in the world today.

Incandescent light bulbs consist of a glass enclosure (the envelope, or bulb) which is filled with an inert gas to reduce evaporation of the filament and reduce the required strength of the glass. Inside of the bulb is a filament of tungsten wire, through which an electrical current is passed. The current heats the filament to an extremely high temperature (typically 2000 K to 3300 K depending on the filament type, shape, size, and amount of current passed through). The heated filament emits light with a continuous spectrum. Some of the emitted energy is is turned into useful, visible light, but a significant abount of energy is given off in the form of near-infrared wavelengths.

In commercial or industrial buildings, incandescent lighting has long been replaced by fluorescent and high-intensity discharge lamps. Even though incansescent lamps have a very high operating cost when compared to other types of lighting, they are, however, the easiest to to use and cheapest to replace. The biggest problem with incandecent lamps is the fact that they are not very efficient. Approximately 90%-95% of the power consumed by an incandescent lamp is emitted as heat, rather than visible light.

In flashlight circles, an incandescent bulb running at a very high power level when compared to a "normal" flashlight may be affectionately referred to as a "hot wire".

The way that incandescent lamps are used in flashlights compared to that of domestic use differ greatly. With flashlights, the main concern is efficency rather than bulb life. If you want your batteries to last as long as possible while still being bright and white, you can allow yourself to sacrifice a lot of lamp life for higher efficiency. In domestic use, a long lifetime is prefered as the lamps get a lot of usage, being on often and for long periods of time.

There are several techniques for increasing the bulbs lifespan and/or it's efficiency. The halogen lamp is the most used improved version of the incandescent lamp. Recent developments such as IR-coating can provide great improvements here. An often foreseen method for gaining lifetime and/or efficiency is impedance matching. Put simply, by choosing another voltage (and thus another bulb) than for example, 12 V, 120 V or 230 V, great benefits can be obtained. For more information about impedance matching, see thislink of CPF.

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