1. Why LED Airport Lighting will Bring Advantages for Air Terminal?
As it is commonsense, airplane traffic has skyrocketed over the last decade, with more passengers seeking planes as a convenient mean of transportation for long distance. In order to accomodate this rising change over the years, airports have increased their opening hours, with some being open 24 hours a day. This situation has clearly led to a heavy impact in costs, with energy expenses, related to airport lights, mounting accordingly.
Now, with the rising of LED technology and its fast development, this new type of renewable energy is being considered for several airport lighting purposes: for runway lights, aircraft shelters, indoor hallways, parking lots, waiting rooms, stores and restaurants sections, lobbies, tracks, corridors or access streets to the infrastructure.
Therefore, many governments across the World have been subsidising and approving laws that support a transition from conventional to airport led lighting, since they are aware that this renewable and clean energy source, not only is brighter, but also is extremely efficient in keeping costs at much lower levels.
Right now, some of the largest airfields in the world are already using LED Flight Lights equipment.
For example:
a. Los Angeles Int.
b. Oakland Int.
c. Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
d. Chicago O’Hare
e. Baghdad, Iraq
f. Kunsan AFB, Korea
LedsUniverse, an airfield light manufacturer from China, has a range of lights that will help you illuminate different spaces, within the entire complex: from the entrance area with our down lights or recessed lights, to the airplane shelter stations with our high bays, or even with solutions for the aircraft corridors and parking areas with our airplane runway lights.
2. Runway Lighting Case Studies
In this section we would like to share with you three past projects we have been part of, within the airfield spectrum.
The first being the illumination of a boarding bridge, which is a part of the overall airport lighting systems.
When analysing the Dialux study you can see we have used 23 units of 720W Flood lights Focus+, which generated a total lumen output of 2548532. The beam angle used was 25 degrees.
Below you can see the shape of our luminary in the IES file.
6 Flood lights were installed on a pole close to the beginning of the boarding bridge, whereas the remaining 17 were mounted around the end of the structure, so that enough light could be spread on the grounds surrounding the air plane.
You can see the layout plan (view from above), as well as the 3D drawing in the next pictures.
In airports there is a minimum requirement for lux on the ground, namely in the areas immediately encircling the aircraft’s, which should be around 20 lux.
By looking at the Isolines Diagram (which are average lux lines), and the Value Chart (which details lux more accurately), you will see that our 700 watt led flood light reached these figures. In this project our customer might also have chosen a 500 watt led flood light, which is a very common fixture as well, but in this case more units would have to be mounted on the central structure.
The entire surface length ran 260m x 210m.
The second project was the illumination of an airport parking or station, by means of airfield lamp.
The parking spots needed to be lit at an average of 30 lux. Minimum values should be around 10 lux when 100m away form the flood lights. This is dissimilar from runway lighting, as airport fixtures are installed on high mast poles, opposed to on the ground.
In this case, we were installing the lights in poles that distanced 80 meters from each other. In each pole we mounted 9 x 300W fixtures, as you can see in the image below.
This is just a small example of 2 parking stations, because, in reality, the airport had many more gates. Check the 3D drawing:
You can see through the Isolines and the Value Chart that the lux on the ground produced by LedsUniverse’s lights very seldom went below 15 lux, even if 100m away from the installation spot.
The third project was the indoor hallways and waiting rooms lighting
