CHALLENGE
A tender request was put out to supply the temporary lighting in the construction phase of the Chiltern tunnels, 2 x 16km bores forming part of HS2, which was required to operate for 4-5 years 24 hours a day. To keep costs down, the costly transformers were set at 300m apart, this meant a 300m solution was needed. The old fashioned way of illuminating, via battens at 7m intervals was considered not ideal due to the stop start nature of the light emitted and the amount of materials needed for this solution was deemed not very eco friendly.
SOLUTION
Our engineering team designed a unique high voltage LED strip and patented a robust silicone sleeve to house the strip which incorporated a compliant emergency lighting scheme. The silicone is flame retardant and zero halogen as per tunnel regulations and the whole solution is plug and play. The most efficient chips were used to achieve 904lm from 7.8w/m and 1040lm from 9w/m. Due to the distance lighting was required between the transformers, the above lumen outputs were considered optimum to achieve the life and reliability of the strip, this was very hard to achieve due to lights being operational for 24 hours a day up to 5 years! Where common high voltage strips use 1 rectifier per 25m and are fully loaded, we use 1000 rectifiers per 25m, to help substantially reduce the heat build up from the current and the heat in the tunnel. We can use either 110v or 230v depending on the requirement. After trials and appraisals we were extremely pleased to be informed that we won the tender process to supply the tunnels with our “INFINILED” solution, we were up against tough opposition across Europe and we now have supplied this unique product onto other infrastructure projects across the world.
