Thread: 'solar' lamp

hi,

is there any commercially-available lamp (or any light source) that mimics the solar spectrum? i am involved in research that requires natural lighting a lot, and it gets quite irritating because the sky gets cloudy unpredictably.

thanks.

Google solar spectrum lamp. There are over 250,000 hits and several on the first page should lead you to a supplier.

thanks for your suggestion. actually i did try searching for something similar, but didn't really look through the hits because they looked more like lamps for decoration purposes

these solar lamps look really sophisticated and expensive. i dont think my advisor will approve of it. are there other simpler types of lamps that can be used to simulate sunlight for research purposes?

I have no expertise in this area. I imagine there may be less expensive options that approach, but do not closely match the solar spectrum. What you should decide is how close a match you need. Is the match more important in one part of the spectrum than another? Could you get some of the necessary effect by using two or more different lamps with different outputs?

Another possibility is to go to your advisor with details of two of the lamps. Both are expensive versions, but one slighlty less so, which is not the best match to the spectrum, but which is adequte. Present the details of both to him and ask which you should get. Human psychology is such that he is much more likely to say yes when asked 'which one should we buy' than if he is asked ' may I buy one'.

Good luck.

There are lamps to treat seasonal affective disorder that claim to be pretty damn close to daylight. Couldn't comment on what truth there is in this.

i am doing some experiments whereby i have to measure the reflectance from a body of water, which contains various optically active components. since the reflectance is a ratio of the outgoing signal to the incoming light, i guess i dont strictly need to simulate the solar spectrum. maybe a normal lamp might work fine. that idea of using a few lamps at different wavelengths sounds like something worth trying out

Anyway, Fluoroescent lamps simulate sunlight better than incandescent lamps.