Snow. J’adore ça. It makes places look a lot nicer than other kinds of weather. But, in this day and age people can’t cope and want somebody to blame for not being able to get to work on time, when they really should be blaming themselves for getting into a panic and not thinking straight.
There are a couple of times where there is someone to blame, just because the solution they have come up with has not been thought through thoroughly enough, and there is one crucial point which has been overlooked. This is clearly what has happened in America, where the designers and the engineers forgot some basic properties of simple electrical components. LED traffic lights. In cities across America, where LED traffic lights are in use and in areas which are prone to snow fall have found that the LED’s do not produce enough heat when in operation to melt the snow from them, resulting in accidents at the junctions, and reportedly someone has been killed because snow was covering the lights.
LED’s are great. They are brighter than incandescent bulbs and they are more efficient so cost less to run. So they make the ideal choice for traffic lights. However, forgetting that they are essentially a cold light source, light without the associated heat, albeit, an easy mistake to make in some cases, can be one which is easily rectified.
So, what are the possible solutions. Replace them with the older kind of traffic lights? Don’t think so, since the cost of making and installing the LED lights would have been too great to go back now. Give the lights some sort of central heating? Again, no, cost would be too great. What I have in mind is far simpler, and could easily be done without having to change the whole light. It pretty much involves only changing the glass or plastic cover of the light. Install or use light covers which have a heating element in them, the same sort of thing cars have on their front and rear windows for use when it gets really cold or when they fog up. This coupled with some sort of sensor, be it one which detects when the lens is covered, or a temperature one which is activated when the temperature is low enough and this is enough to sort the problem. The heating element does not need to be hot, just warm as that will be enough to melt whatever is on the lens. This quick sketch shows basically what I mean, the heating element is crisscrossing the lens and should melt the snow easily.
That idea is better than the additional one which I thought up which involved channeling the heat from the electrical connections since they heat up significantly when in use, and when there is a large voltage going through which is what would be happening with the traffic light.
The snow, the problem or the solution? Or is it the people who don’t think things through, and as I leave you with that thought, here is a picture which shows the ingenuity people have when the snow comes. Makeshift snowplough anybody?
LED traffic light picture and information from Engadget and Autoblog
Door snowplough picture from thereifixedit.com
No comments:
Post a Comment