Design and radiation tests on a LED based emergency evacuation directional lighting

A LED (Light Emitting Diode) based directional lighting system has been designed to indicate the best evacuation direction for applications like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel. The design includes constraints for redundancy required by safety systems and for components selection by radiation effects. Most of the literature for radiation effects on LEDs concern digital communications systems, although some recent reports do exist for visible spectrum power LEDs and the reduction in light output versus dose is coherent with the results presented in this paper. Prototype lighting units were irradiated in CERN’s CHARM facility up to a Total Integrated Dose (TID) of 870 Gy and no failures were observed. This paper describes the basic design, presents field tests and the effects of radiation on the LEDs luminance.