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What material for conventional lighting?
PCA (PolyCrystalline Alumina) are also designated as translucent ceramics, which play a role of tubes in the conventional lighting systems. Their role is to maximize the light transmittance (Ultraviolet, Infrared or visible light) while resisting to high temperatures and pressures. Those pieces are made of alpha alumina like CR or TCP.
HID Lamps (High Intensity Discharge lamps) refer to light sources created from a current passing through a gas contained in a PCA tube. The HID family includes Mercury vapor, Metal Halide, High Pressure Sodium (HPS), Xenon Metal Halide (XMH), Xenon short-arc lamps & Carbon Arc lamps.
A Fluorescent Lighting Tube is made of a glass tube, filled with argon and traces of mercury. The tungsten electrodes on both sides of the tube spread a current that turns into UV radiation in contact with the gas. The inside of the tube is coated with a mix of phosphors in order to convert this UV radiation into visible light and high purity alumina to reflect the residual UV light.
Properties of conventional lighting technologies
PCA has remarkable properties in conventional lighting applications:
- High transmittance of visible light, often requiring a warm, orange glow.
- Efficient diffusion properties; the light must diffuse in every direction with the same intensity.
- Thermal resistance: PCA ceramics are stable at temperatures up to 1,600°C. In comparison, glass is already reacting at 550°C.
- High pressure resistance. Indeed, increasing the pressure in Sodium lamps boosts the efficiency of the lamp and improves the color rendering. The use of performing PCA made the fabrication of High Pression Sodium lamps (HPS) possible.
At Baikowski®, we optimized powders for optical functions in the final ceramics, as we control the purity, the size of particles & formulation for sintering process to ensure the highest density ceramic parts. Moreover, we can dope our products on request in order to add intended properties for your final ceramic parts.
Highly crystallized alumina has been proving its optimal UV reflection ability over the years of lighting evolution. Baikowski® optimized its powders for reflection properties, as we control the chemical purity as well as the crystallographic purity.
Applications for conventional lighting
PCA and UV reflection coatings appear in:
- High intensity discharge (HID) lamps, such as High-Pressure Sodium (HPS) lamps
- Fluorescent lighting tubes
As a result, you can find those technologies in:
- Public lighting
- Horticulture
Processability of Baikowski® powders
Processability of Baikowski® powdersWe provide powders for PCA and UV coating. Since we know that each customer has his own process, our powders adapt easily to:
- Extrusion; Baikowski® provides products with an optimal compromise between density and shrinkage of the intermediate ceramic green bodies.
- Hot Pressing & HIP (Hot Isostatic Pressing)
- Injection Molding, first step to make feedstocks
- Casting
- Coating; Our products, like CR, allow easy one-step deposition of UV reflection coating inside tube lamps, thanks to very low impact on the viscosity of the slurry.