Metal Halide Mercury Lamp Spectrum

1 how it works.

Metal halide mercury lamp spectrum.

Some manufacturers mix the metal halide technology with others to improve light output and add a few variations into the color spectrum for a more complete solution. The lamp uses mercury vapor to create the powerful light like the high pressure mercury vapor but includes other metals halide salts to improve the color. These lamps feature special chemical compounds known as halides that produce light in most regions of the spectrum. They offer high efficacy excellent color rendition long service life and good lumen maintenance.

A halide is a chemical compound of a halogen combined with an electropositive element or in the case of lamps. The german physicist leo arons 1860 1919 studied mercury discharges in 1892 and developed a lamp based on a mercury arc. Usually they re rated with a high lumen output of around 100 lm per watt a lamp life of up to 20 000 hours and pretty decent degradation rates. In 1860 john thomas way used arc lamps operated in a mixture of air and mercury vapor at atmospheric pressure for lighting.

Metal halide salts exhibit lower vapor pressures than the elemental mercury added to the bulb which also serves as a buffering gas to determine the operating voltage of the lamp. Metal halide lamps are among the most energy efficient sources of white light available today. A metal halide lamp is an electrical lamp that produces light by an electric arc through a gaseous mixture of vaporized mercury and metal halides compounds of metals with bromine or iodine it is a type of high intensity discharge hid gas discharge lamp. Charles wheatstone observed the spectrum of an electric discharge in mercury vapor in 1835 and noted the ultraviolet lines in that spectrum.