Xenon lighting adjusted to plant requirements

Xenon lamps are available as low and high power lamps with relatively high efficiency and a relatively long lifetime up to several thousand hours. Different construction types of short-arc and long-arc lamps permit a good adaptation to various applications in projection and illumination techniques without substantial changes of the spectral quality. Hence, the xenon lamp was the best choice for professional technical purposes where high power at simultaneously good spectral quality of the light was required. However, technical development does not stand still. Between the luminous efficacy of xenon lamps of 25-50 lm/W and the theoretical limit for 'white light' of 250 lm/W is still much room for improvement. The present development mainly favors other lamp types, like metal halide lamps and fluorescent lamps for commercial lighting purposes. The enclosed sections deal with some of the properties of xenon lamps relevant to plant illumination; particularly the spectral aspects, the temporal characteristics of the emission, and finally the economy of xenon lamps will be addressed. Due to radiation exceeding the natural global radiation in both the ultraviolet (UV) and the infrared (IR) regions, filter techniques have to be included into the discussion referring to the requirements of plant illumination. Most of the presented results were obtained by investigations in the GSF phytotron or in the closed Phytocell chambers of the University of Erlangen. As our experiences are restricted to area plant illumination rather than spot lights our discussion will concentrate on low pressure long-arc xenon lamps which are commonly used for such plant illuminations. As the spectral properties of short-arc lamps do not differ much from those of long-arc lamps most of our conclusions will be valid for high pressure xenon lamps too. These lamps often serve as light sources for small sun simulators and for monochromators which are used for action spectroscopy of plant responses.