As the costs of LED sources declines and the performance improves, LED products are rapidly being adopted for general illumination applications. This is a positive development in terms of energy consumption, as LEDs use significantly less electricity per lumen produced than many traditional lighting technologies. However, it is forcing a significant amount of lamp manufactures in other directions and making many tradition tungsten halogen lamps difficult to source.
Many of the large manufacturers of traditional lamps such as Philips, GE, Osram,and Ushio have transitioned to manufacturing LED based lamps to replace their historical gas filled lamp product lines and are continuing to stop production on many lamps designs that are showing a decline in sales.
Customers who still require the broad band illumination of a traditional light source, the IR output of gas filled lamp, or the specific beam pattern of an MR16 ellipsoidal reflector are now finding their cost are increasing, minimum buy levels are sky rocketing and in some cases their supply has dried up all together.
ILT has worked with numerous customers to replicate discontinued lamps for applications including medical, automotive, wood and refuse sorting/analysis, and more. We have designed and manufactured molds for custom reflectors, created new filament designs and experimented with changing burners in existing reflector designs to a higher/lower power bulb, as well as adding gold or aluminum coating to increase the IR output.