White paper
LEDs are everywhere now in cannabis cultivation, but most of the options look and behave the same. We have been working on a completely different way to light a grow space, and it is backed by real simulation data, not marketing slides.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein
Plain-language updates about uniformity, spectrum, and real test results.
For me it comes down to two things: spectrum and uniformity.
Uniformity means every point across your canopy is getting roughly the same light intensity. A non uniform setup is what most of us are used to. Very bright hotspots under the main fixture area, with weak, underlit zones around the edges and in the corners.
Spectrum is the mix of colors your system is putting out. You want a balanced spectrum and the ability to push that balance around as the crop moves through veg and flower. In practice that means a white based, tunable spectrum, so you can run more blue relative to red in veg, more red relative to blue in flower, and add some far red at the end of flower to push quality and finish.
First, it is not a bar light and it is not a flat quantum board. The physical layout is different and the control strategy is different.
Familiar. Big fixed frames with hard-to-avoid hotspots.
Instead of a few long bars or a big board, we use many compact LED modules arranged in concentric square rings (for square grow spaces) and rectangular bands (for rectangular grow spaces). Each ring is its own dimming zone, so the system can shape the light field across the whole room instead of blasting everything at one fixed intensity.
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I use the Radiance lighting simulation engine as the main tool to design and tune the layout. Radiance is a physically based engine that lets me build the exact geometry of the room and the fixture and measure PPFD at a grid of points across the canopy.
To keep this honest I also cross check the results in DIALux, since that is a common industry tool. After fixing the sensor grid so both tools sample the same points, the statistics match within about 0.1 percent. In other words, Radiance and DIALux agree on the numbers, which is what we want. Radiance is what makes it possible to simulate this non standard layout in the first place, and DIALux is a sanity check that the results line up with what a standard workflow would report.
First, here is what a typical bar style fixture looks like in simulation.
These heatmaps show the first major problem I want to highlight: the scalability problem. With non modular grow lights you cannot always fit a “perfect” layout of fixtures into the room. The same hardware that lands at about 86 percent DOU in a 16 × 16 space drops to about 66 percent DOU in a 12 × 12 space. Same basic light, same basic technology, very different uniformity, just because the room geometry changed.
On top of that, it is hard to hit a precise target PPFD with these setups. In both of these runs the target was set to 800, but the averages drift up to around 940 and 1090 because you are forced to overdrive some areas to keep other areas from going too dim.
With our modular system, DOU stays high even when the room size changes.
Same target PPFD around 800. Uniformity stays in the 98 to 99 percent range, and the corners are only a few percent below the mean instead of 30 to 40 percent down.
Here are the heatmaps for the simulation runs with PPFD values overlaid, plus 3D surface plots.
In the next paper we will follow up with:
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