LED for art lovers
The Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg is one of the first museums in Germany to install modern LED lighting
Guido da Siena, Sandro Botticelli, Luca Signorelli – paintings by the great Italian masters of the 13th to late 16th centuries can be admired by visitors to the acclaimed Hamburg exhibition hall Bucerius Kunst Forum until January 2012 ("The invention of the picture. Early Italian masters until Botticelli"). Yet, the technology used to illuminate the masterpieces effectively is anything but historic: in cooperation with OSRAM, the lighting concept has been completely converted to energy-efficient LED lighting with excellent colour reproduction.
The new LED solution at the Bucerius Kunst Forum means that exhibits can be displayed in a light that appears almost natural.
If, due to architectural or conservational reasons, a museum is unable to present its artefacts using solely daylight, halogen lighting has until now frequently been employed. Although this offers very good colour reproduction, from an energetic point of view it is considerably less efficient than compact light diodes. The Bucerius Kunst Forum is now one of the first exhibition halls in Germany to undergo the change from halogen to LED lighting, at the same time achieving an energy-efficient lighting solution. The employed LED solution also illuminates the exhibits ideally: thanks to good red reproduction the spots allow the exhibits to shine in a light that appears natural.
Masterpieces in focus
The system uses lights from the DLAD series, which was developed especially for the museum lighting by the Dedo Weigert company, with high-performance and efficient Prevaled LED modules by OSRAM. The high lighting quality provided by the DLAD lights is based upon the latest LED Brilliant Mix concept by OSRAM Opto Semiconductors: a colour mix of bright OSLON SSL LEDs in EQ White and Amber. With dimensions of just 3mm x 3mm, these are some of the smallest of the 1-W class and can further be clustered closely. As a consequence, the lights themselves take up very little space and do not disturb the appearance of the room.
Depending on the luminous flux required, a varying number of LEDs is combined with one another. With the Brilliant Mix concept, this results in a warm white light with particularly high light yield (110 lm/W) and a color rendering index (CRI) of more than 90. The high CRI is optimal for colors and skin tones to appear as natural-looking in artificial light as in daylight and – as in the case of the current exhibition – enhancing the colour gradients that characterise Gothic-era painting techniques.
Sensitive lighting
With their 150-degree angle of reflected beam, the OSLON SSL LEDs are ideally suited for LED spots. The new DLAD lights generally provide for a particularly homogenous light distribution, irrespective of the degree of focus. If more strongly focused light is required, for example to highlight a large sculpture, this can be achieved by altering the shutters on the lights. The LEDs themselves are also "sensitive": because they include neither infrared nor UV components in their light, they cause no harm to the exhibits. The low thermal resistance of 7K/W for the OSLON SSL LEDs means that there is no need for complex thermal management – the little amount of heat that is produced is radiated to the rear, ensuring that it does not reach the exhibits. This means that visitors will still be able to marvel at the masterpieces of Botticelli and the other masters in the future - in the best light, and undamaged.