LED light heads from TridonicAtco have been used in the creation of a stunning glass staircase at The County Hall – Riverside Building, a building with an interesting history previously being the home of the LCC and the GLC. The building boasts some of the most spectacular views in London. It is currently the home of the London Eye, the London Aquarium, The Marriott Hotel, Travel Inn Hotel, and the Dali Gallery and others. The County Hall – Riverside Building is rapidly becoming a significant destination within the capital with an ongoing development programme designed to further enhance interest.As part of the rejuvenation, Public Screen & Light System Limited were asked by the architect's Messrs RHWL and Metal UK, who built and installed the staircase, to come up with ideas on the technical design and installation of a new staircase within County Hall. The task was to translate the architect's vision for lighting the stunning glass staircase that leads from the ground to first floor level and which allows access from Queens Walk and the London Eye ticket hall to a new first floor Chinese exhibition. To further complicate the project, Public Screen had only six weeks to get the job done, from concept to completion.
As the staircase was almost completely of glass construction, anything requiring wires posed a problem so LEDs seemed to be the solution. TridonicAtco LED's were chosen the reliability of their colour and brightness batching, the quality of the lamps and TridonicAtco's ability to manufacture in a very short lead-time. A cool white was chosen to complement the blue tinge of the glass and work well with the blue line of the design.
A combination of precision wavelength measurement and proportional phosphor dosing in the assembly of TridonicAtco's white LED light sources has eliminated the problems of matching colour temperature so often associated with other white LEDs. The level of accuracy is so refined that even different batches of LEDs are guaranteed to offer the same colour temperature, so there is no need to keep a record of bin numbers (see explanation below).
Thanks to their partnership with Toyoda Gosei, TridonicAtco is able to select LEDs to within very fine tolerances. These are then fine tuned even further by measuring the wavelength of each LED and dosing with a precise and individual amount of phosphor to ensure the desired colour temperature is attained. As far as we are aware, no other manufacturer calculates the phosphor dosing for each individual LED. White LEDs are available in consistent, repeatable Warm White, Cool White and Daylight colour temperatures.
Michael Smillie of Public Screen, project manager of the installation, chose to use TridonicAtco's P106 and P108 PCBs in conjunction with the 6500 Kelvin cool white LEDs. He chose them because the area would also be in use in daylight hours, making brightness critical if the architect's vision was to be achieved. Since the dimensions worked perfectly, both the manufacturing process and assembly during installation were greatly simplified.
The units could also be mounted against the glass edges on a specially designed heat-sink channel to ensure maximum lamp life (this was calculated using data within TridonicAtco's data sheets). Michael commented: "The result was exactly what we, and the client, were hoping to achieve – in fact it surpassed all our expectations".
