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Whelen releases NEW LED Landing light and test data

Kahuna

Kahuna

Moderatoring
Whelen has released its new PAR 36 Plus Landing and Taxi light for your round hole leading edge lights. These new lights are 40% brighter than previous versions, greater than 40% brighter than the competitors, and were also tested by a 3rd party lab for performance. You may have seen this thread on the strobe performance against competitors and this article on the subject.
Below is the data from the test lab on the performance of the new Par 36 Plus LED landing lights. A fancy brochure on the lights here. These lights are now available with leading edge kits as well as individually. Light has a new release price of $240.00.
Compare price, Compare performance. Compare quality.

par36performancedata.jpg
 
so is the total light output the area under each curve? next question, is 60,000 that much more usable than 40,000? I have no idea. how does this compare to a car headlight, for instance?
 
4509

kjlpdx said:
so is the total light output the area under each curve? next question, is 60,000 that much more usable than 40,000? I have no idea. how does this compare to a car headlight, for instance?
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A certified, old-fashioned 12v aircraft 4509 bulb is 110,000 candela, so LEDs are almost getting there in light output.

The 4509s have a 12 degree horizontal angle (presumably at the 50% output point) so the Whelen LED one is about the same or perhaps a bit less.

LEDs have them beat on price, lifetime, power used and heat though. :)
 
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Flashing with LED's can be tricky due to the wide variety of light loads. Whelen's Model 71700 is an electronic solid state light flasher (no noise) for use with Whelen LED lighting products. The flasher operates two outputs steady on or will flash outputs alternately. This has the operating ability to handle up to 5 amps of power. Sure is great to have a purpose built wig-wag flasher specifically for LED products! Wiring diagram is here.
Experimental use only
Weight 0.14 lbs
Dimensions H x W x L 0.54? (14mm) x 2.04? (52mm) x 2.74? (70mm)
Operating Voltages 14 or 28 VDC
Combined Alternating Flash Rate 90 FPM (+ / - 10 FPM)

wig-wag.jpg
 
flytoboat said:
Will the VP-X wig-wag circuit work with these lights?
Click to expand...

You would have to check with the Vertical Power folks. You can advise them that each PAR36 Plus Light at 14v pulls ~1.2 amps. With that they should be able to tell you if it was designed for the low amp draw of LED landing lights.
 
Graph data

Is there a graph available with a vertical angle data and/or a polar graph? Would be interesting to look at more than one axis.
 
Dan - check out the link to the "fancy brochure" in Kahuna's original post. That brochure gives a polar plot showing full angular measurement like a temperature plot, making it easy to visualize.

Unfortunately none of the data shows a comparison to the trusty (and cheap!) 4509 bulbs so we can do a comparison against what we might currently be flying or have flown regularly in the past. Having not yet flown with one of these fancy LED lights it's hard to imagine how they might look from the cockpit. A claim of "40% brighter" would be a lot more useful if there were 3 comparison photos "as viewed from the cockpit", with a 4509 vs an original Parmetheus vs the new super-duper Parmetheus. This kind of test should be dead easy to set up - no aircraft required, just a battery, a tripod mount for the lights, and another tripod for the camera. I'm sure Whelen can figure it out, but what I fear is they may not want to actually share the results because of the hard-to-beat "hot" centre of the 4509 which gives us that long down-the -runway visibility that we need to avoid critters of the night.
 
Canadian_JOY said:
Dan - check out the link to the "fancy brochure" in Kahuna's original post. That brochure gives a polar plot showing full angular measurement like a temperature plot, making it easy to visualize.

Unfortunately none of the data shows a comparison to the trusty (and cheap!) 4509 bulbs so we can do a comparison against what we might currently be flying or have flown regularly in the past. Having not yet flown with one of these fancy LED lights it's hard to imagine how they might look from the cockpit. A claim of "40% brighter" would be a lot more useful if there were 3 comparison photos "as viewed from the cockpit", with a 4509 vs an original Parmetheus vs the new super-duper Parmetheus. This kind of test should be dead easy to set up - no aircraft required, just a battery, a tripod mount for the lights, and another tripod for the camera. I'm sure Whelen can figure it out, but what I fear is they may not want to actually share the results because of the hard-to-beat "hot" centre of the 4509 which gives us that long down-the -runway visibility that we need to avoid critters of the night.
Click to expand...

Let me do some digging on this for you and Ill get back with some info.
 
Whelen

I run Whelen's on my response truck and love them. I think their LED's are the best and look forward to supporting Whelen by using them on my -9 also.
 
OK, I am willing to talk about this comparison since you brought it up...

First off, the peak candela you are showing on the test data is not indicative of our more recent production units, but is more in line with what we were putting out a couple of years ago. Here is a plot that shows data from a recently manufactured Sunspot 36 compared to the data that you provided in your graph:

WvsA.jpg


I'm only showing 1/2 of the beam pattern for simplicity, but as was shown on the original plot, both lights are pretty symmetric. Both lights have similar peak candela values, and given the inverse square law, and how our eyes work both peaks will give similar distance of viewability for the beam center.

Now, the Parmetheus Plus consumes 19 Watts according to the latest datasheet, while the Sunspot 36 consumes close to 45 Watts. Consequently, the total lumens generated by the two lights is not equal. The Sunspot 36 generates about twice the total lumens within the range of +/-10 degrees from the beam center. Using the provided data from Whelen, and our data, I can do a piece-wise integration of the candela values to determine the lumens. When I do this, I get the following:

Parmetheus Plus total lumens between +/-10 degrees of beam center = 550
Sunspot 36 total lumens between +/-10 degrees of beam center = 1020

The biggest difference is in the total beam width. The human eye can only see about two decades of light at any given level of adaptation. Thus, when the beam intensity drops below 1/100 of the peak, there is not enough light to see anything beyond that angle.

For the Parmetheus Plus this occurs at about 5 degrees off of the beam center, while for the Sunspot 36 this occurs at about 8 degrees off of the beam center. The Sunspot 36 therfore provides at least 3 degrees per side (6 degrees total) wider field of view at a usable illumination level.

This can be seen by doing a side-by-side comparison of these two lights, and in fact we show people both the Paremetheus and the Sunspot 36 at our booth for this reason.

Dean Wilkinson
CTO, AeroLEDs LLC
 
I have to think that we're paying too much attention to plot graphs and hot spots, etc. The real test is if we can see well enough to taxi, land, and be seen by other aircraft (anti collision). Landings can be made without any lights at all of course, as they're not even required for night ops. After all, are you really going to have time to react even if your lights do pick out a deer on landing rollout? it's not like we're racing an off road truck across the desert at 100 MPH...

I don't know how the Whelen and AeroLeds stack up to each other in a real world application, but I know my $50 Trustfire flashlights completely blew away the two 100w GE landing lights that were in my Rocket. The point is, we are so much better off today with LED's than we were just a year ago, what's the point about arguing a few degrees/candela... Especially since next year, today's performance will be "obsolete".
 
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The Whelen Lights (P36P1L)(P36P1T) are 14volt lights is there any loss of performance at lower voltage ?
I had one wired to a old motorcycle battery today , had 22feet of 22gauge wire powering the light , 12.25 volts at the battery , 11.6 at the light with it on . I wanted to see how hot they got ( 125* F after 30 minutes )

Strange thing was after 2 hours of burn time they never got any hotter but the battery voltage went UP ! 12.7 volts

Would they be brighter at a higher voltage ?
At what voltage do the quit working ?
 
Dean_aeroleds said:
The biggest difference is in the total beam width. The human eye can only see about two decades of light at any given level of adaptation. Thus, when the beam intensity drops below 1/100 of the peak, there is not enough light to see anything beyond that angle.

For the Parmetheus Plus this occurs at about 5 degrees off of the beam center, while for the Sunspot 36 this occurs at about 8 degrees off of the beam center. The Sunspot 36 therfore provides at least 3 degrees per side (6 degrees total) wider field of view at a usable illumination

Dean Wilkinson
CTO, AeroLEDs LLC
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It looks to me like 5 and 8 degrees are the 1/10 peak points, not 1/100?
 
Whelen Voltage

Received a reply from Whelen on light output vs voltage , same light output 14 down to 10 . Looks like 22ga wire is the ticket .
 
BobTurner said:
It looks to me like 5 and 8 degrees are the 1/10 peak points, not 1/100?
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Good catch Bob, you are correct. That puts the Whelen threshold at 7 degrees and the AeroLEDs threshold at about 15 degrees off-axis. I inadvertently looked at the 1/10 points when I meant to look at the 1/100 points.
 
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