September 2020

SPECIAL FOCUS Lighting Category Partners: Media Partners: JOIN US ONLINE AND CELEBRATE MANUFACTURING IN YOUR REGION. Don’t MISS OUT and BOOK NOW AT: makeuk.org/awards visibility and productivity. Colour temperatures between 4000K and 5000K are the best choice for warehouses, giving a comfortable white colour, a good option for spaces where staff are working for long periods of time under artificial light. “Smart lighting technology will enable the direction, power and colour of lighting to be adjusted automatically,” says VTT Research Professor Heikki Ailisto. “Lights positioned near windows will change colour according to outdoor temperature. In office buildings, smart lighting technology could even help shift-workers adapt to changes in their circadian rhythms!” Visible light communication Driverless transportation systems and a wide array of machines and equipment all communicate with each other and exchange data in the production environment. They are often installed and operated in different locations, making a wireless connection indispensable. But the wireless spectrum is overloaded. While 5G technology will alleviate this problem, WLAN and Bluetooth have limited bandwidth, making conventional wireless communication problematic. Now, a team of researchers at Fraunhofer IOSB-INA is working on enabling factory machines to communicate using light pulses, a system known as visible light communication (VLC). “The light spectrum ranges from 380 to 800nm. about 4000 times wider than the entire available wireless spectrum,” says IOSB researcher Daniel Schneider. “VLC is already used in offices, homes and laboratories and is now being used to implement indoor navigation systems in shopping centres. Factory buildings, however, where there are far more sources of interference, present significant challenges for communications technology which haven’t yet been studied in sufficient depth.” With the use of energy-efficient LEDs for visible light communications in industrial premises, the challenge is now to overcome problems due to walls, metallic objects, machines and other interfering signals. Tests with five industrial companies are on-going. Acknowledgement Information supplied by Saxby Lighting, Raytec, Whitecroft Lighting, VTT and Frwaunhofer was used in the compilation of this article.