3 ms·
I think you're making an assumption about lumens/watt that may or may not be valid. Who knows what a Light Emitting Daisy could achieve?
by lucozade 9y ago
I think you're making an assumption about lumens/watt that may or may not be valid.
Who knows what a Light Emitting Daisy could achieve?
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoI know one thing for sure: it will achieve less output radiance than it receives as solar insolation. I would be surprised if they were able to make it glow only when it was dark, so put a 50% modifier on that. Then you need to account for the energy needs of the plant, any inefficiencies in the light producing chemistry and light emitting apparatus (a semi-opaque bulk emitter will absorb a lot of the radiation it produces), but we'll generously assume that's equal to the difference between a conventional electric bulb and its light output, so we can approximate the light intensity with our expectations of regular lights. But you also need to account for the photosynthetic efficiency which Wikipedia says is about 2% [1], so you are at 1% of incoming light energy in equivalent electric light power. Solar insolation gives you up to 1 kW per square meter, a large daisy might have an irradiated area of 0.01 meters or 10W input, and you get 1% of that so 0.1W output. That's a couple lumens, or about 10x less than a typical solar landscape light. Which is as you would expect, because we eliminated the light sensor and (more importantly) used photosynthesis instead of a solar panel. But fortunately, these things literally grow like weeds, or on trees! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency