Ag machines often work day and night, in particular during the harvesting season. “Hence the job must be done properly, without fatigue for the driver”, says TYRI R&D director Christian Wadell. The answer lies in proper LED lighting on these vehicles. Wadell explains which are the basics for developing such lights.
ADVERTORIAL
By Edvard de Ronde
TYRI lighting from Sweden is OEM supplier to the global ag machinery industry. They develop, produce and design high-end LED lighting systems. Both in Sweden and in the USA the company runs R&D centers, which are specialized in developing light systems for commercial vehicles, such as ag machinery.
“An agricultural vehicle needs proper lighting”, says Christian Wadell. “Whether it’s a tractor or a machine like a harvester. At TYRI, we design such lights. Of course this all relates to the basics of light, and to the “behavior” and the properties of the human eye. After all, the eyes of the driver tend to draw to the highest intensity of the light. To the hotspots, so to say. But you don’t want that. Therefore the challenge for us is to create even illumination all around the machine. This is the best working condition for the human eye, without getting fatigue. “
“Also color temperature is important. On an ag machine that should be somewhere in between 4,000 and 6,000 Kelvin degrees. Low quality lights can be a 10,000 Kelvin degrees.
Historically LED chips emit blueish light, which is converted into visible light. On nowadays’ LED technology we managed to take down that blue spike. What you actually want is to have light that replicates the sunlight. The closer you get to the sunlight, the better it is. The human eye is evolved for sunlight. Everything that goes outside that is not optimal. Too high Kelvin reflects a lot more light from particles in the air, such as rain, dust, snow or whatever.
The driver will get irritated by reflection. It’s like when you drive in the snow. If you turn on the high beams on the car, you can see hardly anything, because it reflects a lot of particles in the air.”
Color Rendering Index
“Another important aspect is application”, Christian continues. “If you work in fruits, or vegetables or something else, you must be able to see what kind of color these have. If you see that the strawberry is mature enough, you want to see the red color.”
For this reason the Color Rendering Index (CRI) comes into practice. Sunlight has a CRI of 100 in which you see all the correct colors.
“If you have an artificial light source, it doesn’t have the same wave length and distribution as the sun. It will disturb the colors. So if you have a low CRI, the red strawberry will look grey, no color. It’s important that if you are picking fruits or whatever, that you can see how they look in real. High quality LED chips with high CRI values will make this possible.“
Changing color temperature
Christian: “INTELLilight is one of our high-end products. It fully eliminates the drawbacks of LED lighting. The driver can change color temperature from the cab. It can go from almost sunlight, halogen light, very low color temperature like 2,700 kelvin, all the way up to 7,000 K degrees. Also you can adjust the light, depending on the environment you’re working in. If you have snow, dust, or anything in the air, or a high reflecting environment, you can lower the color temperature in that particular area.
If you work for instance in dark soil, which reflects very little light back because it’s almost black, then you can increase the color temperature, so you can see better in that dark soil. You can adjust the system for the actual situation you’re currently in within seconds.”
“Vehicles like tractors have on road approved lights, because they drive on the road. But this is completely different from the functionality you have with a work light. With an on road light, you need to see far because of the high speed. We optimize our drive lights for a tractor. We use everything we can within the regulation to make it as good as possible.”
From halogen to LED
“Halogen light, the older technology, is almost identical to the sunlight. Because it’s heating up a wire, you get the same sort of wave length distribution. Yet we use LED chips because these have many benefits, that’s why we use it “, Christian proceeds.
“As everybody else, we started out with halogen, because LED technology just wasn’t mature enough for work lights. In the beginning, LED chips only delivered 100 or 200 lumen. Now that has changed, so now we have much more light from LED than ever with a halogen light. The development of LED chips has evolved pretty fast. That’s the reason there’s hardly interest for halogen lights anymore. But we still produce them for some customers. These are getting less and less however. I think in Sweden something like 95 percent today is LED.
The operator needs a good working environment and must have as much uptime as possible with this very expensive equipment. If you need to change a light bulb every 500 hours, then you must change 10 – 12 lights every 500 to 1000 hours. With LED light, you don’t have to change these during the whole lifetime of the machine. A quality LED light has a longer lifespan than the machine itself.
Also the power draw is almost 1/10 of that of a halogen light. This is important for all machines, but even more for electric vehicles.”
Quality is leading
“In the end, good lighting is all about quality. And quality of course is to have a long lifetime. Cheaper manufacturers are using not that good material. So the life time is better with high quality. We test everything in our facility in Goteborg in order to be sure that we have good quality components to work with. Poor quality may lead to magnetic radiation. You can buy a bad light from China for example. But then your phone doesn’t work or the radar doesn’t work when you use that kind of light. Or the other way around, it may happen that the light doesn’t work.
Quality is both the product quality, but also the light quality it produces in terms of even illumination, color temperature and CRI (Color Rendering Index).
At TYRI, our mission is and remains to produce good quality lights for professional OEM’s. LED there be light, now and in the future”, Christian Wadell concludes.
