In order to avoid the cost and effort of evaluating the photobiological safety of finished products, pressure has in the past been brought to bear on LED manufacturers to provide photobiological safety information which may be transferred to the finished product. It is clear that an IEC62471 evaluation of a bare LED is not directly transferable to a finished product, which may include multiple emitters and beam-shaping optics, so another strategy should be employed.
The irradiance of the finished product cannot in any way be predicted. However, in the case of radiance-based hazards, a measurement of the true radiance, coupled with the law of conservation of radiance, may be used to determine the maximum possible radiance of any finished product using a given LED.
IEC TR 62471-2 introduces this principle for the evaluation of the blue-light hazard (the dominant concern for retinal injury) through a measurement of true radiance of the component LED at 200-mm distance and 1.7-mrad FOV. The resulting value is adopted as the blue-light radiance of the final product, to be compared with the exposure limit values of each risk group in turn. It is important to note that care should be taken to ensure that the data provided by the manufacturer provides a correct analysis for the operating conditions of the finished product.
This procedure leads in many cases to an over-estimation of the hazard, since account is not taken of physiological radiance. This is demonstrated in Table 2, where a comparison is made between an IEC62471 analysis and a worst-case analysis of a particular product. In the former case, each RG is considered in turn, with measurements being performed in the correct FOV and compared with the RG exposure limit. In the latter case the worst-case radiance is assumed and compared with the limits of each risk group in turn (resulting in an RG2 classification).
A similar result is obtained in many instances, especially when considering high-power LEDs used in SSL applications. According to IEC TR 62471-2, blue-light RG2 requires the use of a warning label. This means that the lighting industry has been faced with the decision of either determining how to implement the recommendation of labeling, or not accepting such worst-case analysis evaluation, which clearly has no bearing on the true hazard posed by the source in the intended application. This procedure has generally been discontinued while awaiting a more acceptable solution, as will be seen below.
Where no photobiological safety-evaluation information is available from an LED manufacturer, some have sought to make estimations based on data-sheet values, which typically report beam-emission angle and either total flux or intensity in photometric or radiometric quantities, depending on whether the LED emission wavelength is within or without the visible region.
Given the emission angle and the evaluation distance, the area illuminated by the LED may be determined and either total flux or intensity used to make an estimate of irradiance. To estimate physiological radiance, it is required to know both the intensity and the FOV area corresponding to the RG considered. Where intensity is not directly reported in the datasheet, it may be calculated from the total flux and beam-emission angle. In the case of white or colored LEDs, where photometric data is often provided, a conversion factor must be determined to convert to radiometric units.
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