Two of the most common electric light sources leveraging xenon’s properties are flash lamps and flashtubes:
Flash lamps:
- High-powered strobe lights producing very short, intense flashes.
- Used for professional photography, spectroscopy, lasers, solar simulation.
- Contain xenon gas pressurized up to ~1000 psi with quartz arc tubes.
- Energy stored in capacitor discharged through lamp to emit microsecond-long flash.
- Can repeat flashes tens of times per second. Lifetime of billions of flashes.
Flashtubes:
- Long glass tubes of xenon gas that emit a brilliant arc flash when discharged.
- Used in industries like mining, lighthouses, alarms, nighttime construction.
- Operate at lower pressure (<100 psi) but larger lamp size than flash lamps.
- Typically one use but some allow repeated flashing.
- Bright output up to millions of candelas covering large areas.
Post time: Sep-26-2023