Two Directions on LED Intelligentized: Intelligent Agriculture and Lifi

With 4.0 concepts emerged on the industry, the traditional mind of manufacturing is experiencing unprecedented impact, integration and upgrade of industrialization and information will be the main theme of the transformation for production structure in the future. LED industry as a huge lighting market, in the new historical situation, only LED intelligent road can go farther. For now, the direction of the LED intelligent is divided into two aspects: agricultural intelligence and optical communication.

For the Internet concept is still in the mainstream of the world, the German academic and industry in 2013 in Hannover industrial exposition on the first proposed “industrial 4.0 research project”, the core of this concept is the Systems Cyber-Physical (CPS), the integration of a variety of digital information, resources, products and persom, thus building an efficient and fast and flexible information, digital products and services production pattern. This concept was quickly spread to Europe from Germany and began to affect the world.

Connotation of intelligent LED lighting

The traditional LED had already appeared in 1962, and a LED product can only emit a low luminosity, and now the light has been spread all over the visible, infrared and ultraviolet light. Recent years, with the emergence of new technologies such as Internet, cloud computing, people are not satisfied with the basic functions of high brightness, low energy consumption, long life and low power, but more to LED and advanced things and cloud computing technology, from human psychology, physiology and sociology, considering the individual comfort, light biological safety and other conditions to improve learning, working and living conditions of the social benefits of reducing air pollution protection environment, that is LED intelligent.

And on the background of industry 4.0, combined with the traditional LED homogenization of the past ten years of serious overcapacity problems. The development and requirement of LED products are not only on their own lighting performance, but efforts to combine with other industrial technology, in order to obtain a composite function of LED smart light, thus the LED industry capacity to carry out the diversion. So far, there are two main diversion direction. The first is to break through in the field of agricultural lighting, and the second is to develop the field of optical communication.

LED agricultural intelligence

In agriculture, we know that light is one of the most important environmental factors for plant growth and development, and it has a direct regulatory effect on the growth and development of plants. As we known that the environmental factors, such as relative humidity, temperature, light intensity and light quality, are closely related to the growth and development of plants. In these factors, the quality of light directly affects the growth of plant stem, lateral branching, leaf growth and pigment deposition, and other major growth indicators. And the integration of these optical quality, mainly through the continuous intensity of red light, blue light, and the path of the hormone signal on the plant has a profound impact on the physiological response and thus the plant’s growth and development plays a important role.

Using LED as the advantages of artificial light source for plant growth is that it has high energy conversion efficiency, DC power supply, small volume of products, is the use of, long service life, determine the wavelength and light intensity / mass ratio to reconcile low heat output. Some of the crops has been LED light culture, such as pepper, spinach, wheat dwelling, etc.. The research shows that the red light has an important effect on the development of the organs of photosynthesis in plants, and it can also increase the amount of starch in plants. It is also reported that the use of far infrared radiation can improve the antioxidant properties of rice husk. This indicates that the specific light radiation can increase the nutritional composition of food.

Overall, in the long run, there is a trend to replace the traditional lighting source with LED. Intelligent lighting system based on LED can be widely used in biological research of plants or animals; and this kind of intelligent system can also be used to determine the intensity and quality of light intensity for specific plant growth. It can be predicted that the agricultural intelligent system based on LED will be the important embodiment of the application of “industry 4” in agriculture.

LED optical communication (lifi)

Lifi is considered as a new type of optical equipment in twenty-first Century. The basic idea of designing this device is to transmit data through the LED light. But the amount of data transmitted by LED is relatively small. At present, Lifi is known as an optimized version of Wi-Fi, which has the advantage can reduce the cost of a large amount of wireless communication.