Lopolight
Lopolight - The ultimate LED navigation Lights
Design
The Lopolight products are unique based innovative use of LED’s (Light Emitting Diodes). Lopolight products are very effective and sophisticated power electronics that deliver low power consumption and extremely long lifetime even in the harshest conditions. In addition all lights are completely sealed to allow submersion.
Actually Lopolight has found their way onto several submarines – where the lights are found to work flawlessly after being tested to 350 meters depth.
The design is 100% focused on the challenge of getting the best navigation lights, so there are no considerations to the classic way of constructing a navigation that was established when the primary light source was kerosene, we have started with a clean sheet of paper.
Mechanical construction principles
The components we use are the classic 3 mm LEDs, the most proven and most efficient type. These LEDs are made to Lopolight specifications with regards to intensity and colour, each LED is graded and tested at the factory, one of the important differences from a standard LED is that the Lopolight LED is encapsulated in a silicon-epoxy package, this ensures a much longer lifetime. Each LED is then inserted in to a specially made acrylic lens that ensures the light is guided in the right direction; acrylic (PMMA) is the only 100% UV-stable transparent plastic in existence.The lens sits inside seawater resistant anodised aluminium housing. The housings are CNC machined to exact dimensions.Inside this housing we hide the electronics – more on this later. The whole unit is then potted out with epoxy, leaving absolutely no air inside the light. This has enabled several submarines to be satisfied with standard Lopolight lights. Actually a Lopolight can stand being submerged to 350 meters!
The above construction process also ensures that a Lopolight is absolutely vibration proof, there are no moving parts and the LEDs are in themselves fully vibration proofed. Lopolight has been tested to withstand acceleration forces up to 50G.
During the production process the lights are thoroughly tested in 6 different stages.
Stage 1: Testing of individual LEDs after these have been subjected to minus 20°C and plus 60°C in several cycles.
Stage 2: Testing of individual lens
Stage 3: Testing of complete electronic assembly
Stage 4: 12 hour test for the complete light before potting
Stage 5: 12 hour test for the complete light after potting
Stage 6: Final test; where the light is tested against preset norms at 12, 24 and 32 Volts and if within 5% of norm a serial number is issued.
So at any given time of day there are several hundred lights testing at the factory – quite a nice lightshow.