The LunaSol Series consist of prototypes and limited production lights having a cluster of Nichia 310 LEDs for a low and broad flood beam and a high power single LED in a collimated beam for a higher intensity and concentrated beam of light.
The LunaSol lights utilize separate drivers for the two LED groups. Components for the LunaSol 27 shown above.
LunaSol 20 LED package shown below with the three Nichia 310DS LED's and the Osram Dragon:
Mother/Daughter converter package:
The LunaSol 20 was originally designed to host the Lumiled's Rebel LED but unfortunately there was a recall on these LED's right after I had purchased a bunch and had them mounted on custom MCPCB's. The reflector was based on the Rebel and I had to remove some from the rear of it to have it focus properly with the Dragon LED. Below is a front end shot of the Rebel in a Proto:
Below is the first Ti proto and before the reflector was made which integrated the Nichia Ports:
Below is another shot of the Proto after I milled some teardrops in the head:
Now back to the limited production LunaSol 20 with Osram Dragon LED:
These lights use the dual input system of the "x2" converter design but instead of one output source at two levels of output, there are two output sources each at their own specific drive level. The first prototype built on this concept should be included here for the "record". It was a Seoul based light using a Seoul P4 with reflector for the high and tight beam and an optic less Seoul 1/2 watt LED for the flood of low and wide beam:
Although this light works great, the flood is offset relative to the spot beam due to the non concentric nature of the flood beam, relative to the spot.
I took a LunaSol 20 at random and did some bench tests on it. This light has a NexGen 400 converter driving the Golden Dragon for high with a BBM driving the string of 3 Nichias at ~18 mA. I put a fresh SureFire CR123 cell in the light and logged the flux (lumens) at 30 second intervals until the light had obviously dropped out of regulation on the Golden Dragon. At the end of the test, the Nichias were still lit and providing about 5 lumens of light and the Golden Dragon LED was not lit. After turning the light off and letting it rest, it came back on with the Nichias in regulation and outputting 8.5 lumens and the Dragon would light up for a short period as well. The run time graph:
From 150 to past 155 minutes you can see the BBM was still regulating the Nichias.
I also wanted to get a feel for the thermal condition of the titanium LunaSol 20 so I did a test using a FLIR camera. The set up:
I determined that the 30 day masking tape (purple) has an emmisivity of 1. There is a thermocouple on a copper penny covered with the same tape and this served as a bench mark. You can see the penny just above the flashlight in the picture above and its location is marked by one of the cross hairs in the FLIR image below:
This FLIR thermal image was taken after the light was on for ~ 15 minutes continuous. You can see that the FLIR is within less than 1/2 a degree of the temperature measured by the Fluke thermometer.
Below is a custom LunaSol 27. This light was anodized by Peter Atwood for the customer and then returned to me for building. Instead of using 6 ea. of the Nichia 310CS white LED's, the customer was looking for something in the red/orange color to compare to a SureFire A2 he has which uses red/orange LED's. I got sample red and yellow 3 mm LED's from Seoul for this build:
A beam comparison between the SF A2 (right) and LunaSol 27 (left):
I compared the stock LunaSol 27 with this custom yellow-red and the A2 in my integrating sphere:
It will be interesting to see how this light performs in the dark for it owner.
