Prognostics of lumen maintenance for High power white light emitting diodes using a nonlinear filter-based approach

High power white light emitting diodes (HPWLEDs), with advantages in terms of luminous efficacy, energy saving, and reliability, have become a popular alternative to conventional luminaires as white light sources. Like other new electronic products, HPWLEDs must also undergo qualification testing before being released to the market. However, most traditional qualification tests, which require all devices under testing to fail, are time-consuming and expensive. Nowadays, as recommended by the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES, IES-TM-21-11), many LED manufacturers use a projecting approach based on short-term collected light output data to predict the future lumen maintenance (or lumen lifetime) of LEDs. However, this projecting approach, which depends on the least-square regression method, generates large prediction errors and uncertainties in real applications. To improve the prediction accuracy, we present in this paper a nonlinear filter-based prognostic approach (the recursive Unscented Kalman Filter) to predict the lumen maintenance of HPWLEDs based on the short-term observed data. The prognostic performance of the proposed approach and the IES-TM-21-11 projecting approach are compared and evaluated with both accuracy- and precision-based metrics. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.