Announcing Our 2024 Finalists

Saving energy is similar to creating energy in this way: if someone saves 1 KWH of energy then there is no need to produce that 1 KWH. This alleviates pollution and helps in carbon credit.

At present, there is a great need for an ultra high efficiency light source (Lumen per Watt), long life (hours), affordable cost ($) and use of minimum (close to zero) toxic materials like mercury.

Incandescent bulbs are notoriously least efficient, producing about 12 Lumen per watt. Their life is also much shorter, at about 1,000 hours. The Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) may have higher efficiency of about 40 Lumen per watt but their color rendition is undesirable. Also they contain anywhere from 5 to 15 milli grams of mercury. Due to this reason, even after 30 years of their introduction they have penetrated only about 15% in the market. The white LED bulbs are a recent phenomenon. This has no mercury, a longer life span of about 25,000 hours and about 40 to 60 Lumen per watt. But it has a major drawback. It produces a lot of heat. The reason for this is that any white LED contains 3 Chips, Red-Green-Blue located at a tiny space. To get rid of this heat it needs aluminum heat sink. This makes it very expensive. Also, in the market it is hard to see any LED bulbs whose output is more than 400 lumen, same as a 40 Watt Incandescent. Further, LEDs are point light. This cannot be used as a household bulb shedding light all around 360 degrees like CFL or incandescent bulb. Generally they are able to shed light in about a 120 degree area.

Micro Sun overcomes all these problems because the light source in this is an ionized gas plasma contained in a tiny quartz bubble of 3 mm. A special mixture of gas with 0.2 Micro gram trace of mercury is ionized in the presence of high electric field. This ionized plasma is similar to sunlight. The 0.2 Micro grams usage means, whatever minimum amount of mercury it takes to make just ONE CFL is enough to make 25,000 Micro Suns. Therefore its environmental impact is minimal when considering its other advantages.

Micro Sun produces 80 Lumen per Watt. The quality of light is similar to cheerful daylight. The life is up to 12,000 hours. Further, its patented design allows the bulb part to be easily separated from its electronic ballast base. This means when eventually the bulb burns out then only replace the bulb retaining the expensive electronics which has more than 50,000 hours life. Unfortunately, both in CFL and LED bulbs, the base from the bulb cannot be separated. Therefore, when the bulb burns out then the expensive, still good electronic ballast is also thrown out along with the bulb. Micro Sun retails at a price similar to a good CFL. This means it is about 30% price of a LED bulb for similar brightness (Lumen).

Considering all these features, it is very logical to think that Micro Sun may replace a substantial percentage of other electrical luminaries in near future.