• Amju Wolf@pawb.social
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    10 months ago

    Pretty much all LED “lamps” are made of many separate LEDs. Nothing would prevent you from having a few UV LEDs in there.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      It’s not a question of impossible (as there are emission bandgaps in the UV and in IR, used in regular LEDs), it’s a question of it being a complete total waste of efficiency to deploy that as standard to satisfy the perceived need of a small number of people.

      I suppose that there being for sale LED lamps clearly marked as, say, “UV and Infrared Enhanced” or something like that would make sense, but adding it to LED lamps in general would be quite the step back when it comes to the gains we’ve had from the higher efficiency of the LEDs (mainly because, as far as I know, those two emission bandgaps in the red and blue part of the spectrum are the most efficient we’ve discovered so far for illumination).

      Thinking about it, it’s quite a cool idea to, say, replace one of the LED “filaments” in the more modern LED lamps with one emitting in the UV or IR spectrum (you can actually get lose LED “filaments” with various colors from a place like Aliexpress, though a quick search hasn’t revealed any with colors outside the visible spectrum) and unlike in incandescent and fluorescent lamps the glass bulb itself doesn’t really serve to keep gas inside or outside - it’s mainly decorative and possibly to keep people from damaging the light structure holding the filaments - so can be removed, though, at least in cheap led light bulbs, one should match the voltage characteristics of the filaments already inside because the designs often take shortcuts to save on the cost of the mains adaptor module that sits inside the bottom of the light bulb.