"please provide details in terms of quantity required..

e.g. 5 mg of mercury....,etc"

Impossible. These will vary depending upon tube size, power output, lighting color etc.

Hi paritoshcd,

As DVader said........ and I echo all of what he said.

You may be able to get the tubes made elsewhere and then transfered to your factory to finish I do not know. But the coating of the inside of these tubes is not easy and can be quite dangerous.

This is not really the sort of thing you can start in a 'back room' and expand. There is glass making, melting, tube machines and coating machines all linked together and it can take an awful lot of space and investment.

Can you tell me why you have thought about starting to manufacture tube lights? And where you live please. This makes it easier to perhaps find suppliers in your area.

If you can get someone to make the bare tubes then you may stand a chance, but you will have to provide a spec for the coating, and to do this you really need to have your own test benches with all kinds of light testers and frequency analysers

Hey thanx for your reply but you seem to be misjudge my question. I don't want to manufacture Fluorescent lamps. but i need that raw material inventory for my research work. so can you please help me by providing approx range of materials required and name of them..

Thanx and regards

Paritoshcd

Hello paritoshcd,

I wonder if there isn't a fluorescent lamp plant near where you live. Perhaps you know of a place where neon signs are made. The components in a neon sign and a fluorescent lamp are similar.

You obviously need some sort of glass envelope to contain the plasma when you operate a gas discharge lamp such as this because it's interior pressure must remain at a constant of 1 to 3 torr. Atmospheric pressure at sea level is 760 torr.

To obtain this low pressure in fluorescent lamp making you will need a system that will pump gas out of the lamp on one end and flush with Argon gas on the other. All traces of air must be removed. You will also need some way to get the electricity into the lamp tube so you will have to have an electrode that has an expansion characteristic that is similar to the type of glass you are using. To make a good seal you will have to embed this electrode wire into the glass at each end of the tube.

On the end of the leadwire, inside the tube you will need an electrode so that the electricity has a place where electrons can jump from a wire into a gas. The electrode can be a cold cathode type or a hot type that has an emitter coating that gives electrons off at a lower temperature, thereby reducing the work function of the lamp. A cold cathode also gets hot but it is made of a metal that does not evaporate as easily at normal current levels. When the plasma is at optimum current the electrode temperature , at the point where the plasma attaches (less than 1mm) to the electrode the operating temperature is 1250°C. So the electrode must be something like tungsten which resists evaporation. And the coils you will find inside any fluorescent lamp have this tungsten wire in a couple of form. One looks like a straight stick with the emitter coating contained inside the basket like shape of the coil. The other type looks like a stick coil that was wound around another mandrel to shorten it.

Anyway, for a hot cathode type electrode you must form an assembly of glass, electrode carbonate coated coil, two lead wires and exhaust tube for each end of the lamp tube. And the lamp tube is usually coated with a man made fluorescent powder frequently called a phosphor, but there is no phosphor in the powder coating. That coating is applied in a liquid form, sprayed in at one end and allowed to drain to the other. Achieving a nice looking consistent coating is a bit of an art form and it requires the skills of a chemical engineer to adjust the way the coating sticks to the glass without bubbles that dry out as clear spots. After the coating has dried, the tubing must be baked to remove by burning out the binder or chemicals that were used to transport the fluorescent powder to the surface of the glass. This requires an oven that has long rotating rollers on a pair of chains that carry them through the oven and back around under the oven to cycle again. The glass rotates on these rollers as it is baked to a temperature just under the softening point of the glass (assuming you are using a typical lime glass). If the glass gets too hot it will loose its shape making it impossible to use. The powder coating after baking is almost like an ash coating and it is fairly easy to rub or blow off. Now the tubes are ready for the electrode pieces discussed above.

You must seal these end pieces with a glass to glass seal while maintaining alignment of the exhaust tubes and you must take care not to melt or burn off the lead wires in the process. This usually requires some special tooling that will rotate the lamp through a series of flames and form the glass so that the only opening to atmosphere is through the small exhaust tubes that stick out past the end of the lamp.

These finished pieces must be transported to a machine that can seal to the exhaust tubes and make electrical contact with all four lead wires (2 at each end). A vacuum tight seal must be made on each exhaust tube and one end must pump gas out while the other lets argon into the other end. The argon acts as a buffer gas and in the absence of mercury it will glow a nice dull purple if excited. But the element that really makes light from electricity is mercury which has a low vapor pressure. So, most of the mercury present in a fluorescent lamp sits around in a liquid form. The amount of mercury involved in the plasma under normal conditions is very small, on the order of a few micro-grams. But because mercury is so chemically reactive , some of it will be lost as it combines with other elements inside the lamp. This is referred to as mercury consumption. So, you must have a chemically clean lamp body before you attempt to evacuate the gas. And if you use an emitter coating on the coil, it is usually applied in the form of a carbonate, you must run electricity through the coil while it is under vacuum to burn off the CO and CO2 from the emitter mixture. This leaves a fairly pure mixture of some elements that will not react with the mercury.

Anyway, when you have pumped the gas out and flushed it with argon and dosed the lamp with a small droplet of mercury, the lamp must be sealed so that some end caps can be attached. To seal the exhaust tube you must carefully apply a heat source to one side of the exhaust tube more than the other so that it will form a glass bubble that will be pulled in and sealed in a short sequence so as to seal and tip the exhaust tube.

Finally you must apply the end caps that will allow you to direct the lead wires to a ballast connection inside some kind of lamp fixture.

Obviously many of these processes are automated. Modern factories make lamps at the rate of 6000 or more per hour on a single production line. A lot can go wrong at several points so it takes some pretty well designed equipment set up in a line that allows glass and other components to flow in and finished product to flow out. At that rate you can fill up several pallets on each shift.

I hope that answers your question. It's not quite a recipe, but the technology is rather well documented if you search the internet.

Hey Thanx a lot for your detailed and concise answer. I can actually visualized the production process with the help of your answer.

But i am not going to manufacture fluorescent lamps. I am working as a research engineer and my project is to carry out "Life cycle analysis of Fluorescent lamps" so for this i want the actual Raw materials used and their approximate range (quantity) required. So please send me list of raw materials and their approximate quantity if possible..

Thanx and regards...

Paritoshcd

Hi Paritoshcd

Right, errmmm, let me see......... You want to do a "life cycle analysis of florescent lamps"

How should I put this......... My reply well, I know the first letter of the first word is 'F', and there is how many, aarrrr right, two words, and the last letter of the second word is errmmm, 'F'!

Put in very simple terms for you, as you are no bloody good at research, and it seems you may be getting paid for perhaps falsifying your job application. How many science degrees did you say you had? And was that a "Masters", but of course it must have been, silly me eh?

Still in very simple terms,......................

You are a lazy good for nothing,....... get off your arse and do your own work seeing as YOU are the one picking up a pay check at the end of the month!

If you can type and you did not get another idiot to type your posts, try research on the type of glass, metal and electronics and chemicals used to build make or assemble a florescent tube!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you thought joining meant you could write in and asked about every little detail you think necessary to do you job, guess what, YOU ARE WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!

This is human nature to get the thing done by not doing home work. During my undergraduate work in Metallurgical Engineering I had friend for whom I did home work and was very happy to submit that to professor.

Even after doing my Ph.D. I end up working some time for others as they fall behind knowingly or under family pressure in home which effected the work habit on job.

As far as I see like each of us get birth, go through maturity and then get old and say good by to make room for next generation.

Product life cycle is no different. We had Camera invented by Kodak and made Kodak as a corporation then we needed some thing we like and other we do not want but keep paying and resulted in the birth of digital camera.

In light bulb as we know uses about 5% of energy for light and 95% heat and if summer we end up paying for air conditioning and is unwanted. Tube help to improve this but not to the extend we as human will like so we kept working and new technology finally taking hold call LED which will give birth to hot LED which will not degrade during use which is current issue

thnx babybear....

hey for your kind information i had collected all the data by visiting several Fluorescent lamp manf. plants but industries here are quite relecutant to provide details. so I applied product breakdown approch to get the details of raw materials & i got the required results.. with arnd 5.57% error... so to minimize that and to see weather i missed any important raw material.. i start this discussion.... but i don't know this site is full of frustrated engineers like you any way thnx for posting that stupid stuff... and take my words "if you don't know anything don't post".......

regards

Hi Guest,

The manufacturers each have there own chemical mix for the glass and the coating inside, so yes would be reluctant to give this secret info' out!

Glass is standard lithium -sodium-aluminum-calcium- borosilicate glass and its modified version with glass melting temperature 1450 oC or less.

Mercury is deposited using thermal vapor deposition and chemical is known to every one and you can look in any chemical supplier like Alfa and will get the information. If you need further information of this more than 40 years old dying technology I will provide you the information but please do not contaminate earth we have better technologies than this now and makes no sense to do damage to environment

"makes no sense to do damage to environment"

What damage would that be? Any what technologies do you have in mind?

"Mercury is deposited using thermal vapor deposition" Really?

Must be a manual or really slow machine. Using heated - evaporated mercury - for thermal vapor deposition is really old and dangerous technology. I would not expect this to be competitive with liquid dosing or embedded mercury in a metal strip.

Hi Masyyood,

Appreciate the info but its not me who wanted to know.

Thanks anyway.

This is investment intensive technology and had its days of ramp up and growth. Now it is close to its death.

Next technology is LED and high temperature LED. This technology needs farless capital investment and product does not generate even 10 percent of the heat generated by above tubes and bulbs.

There are good number of experts who can give you a jum start in this field and if you ramp up as the technolgy is ramping up you will stay in profit and competative in global business.

LED low and high temperature both are green technology and does not need poison as mercury you are looking to apply

Hi Masyood,

Just to say I fully echo your opinion! It is perfectly possible to go out and buy yourself a Tube making factory. Whether you would recoup the cost in yours or yours Sons lifetime is another thing! Phillips and other factories which were and are at the forefront of this factoring, started business over a hundred years ago and increased in size over time, also making money from machines they invented to make what was then a necessary item, the light bulb and then fluorescent lamp.

Good luck

Now you tell us that what you are really interested in is the "life cycle analysis of florescent lamps". Well, I suppose you might start with the components and attempt to generate some sort of analysis but you will have missed the point if you don't include the energy consumption of the lamp product over its useful life.

The biggest improvements in fluorescent lighting over the last couple of decades has been the use of more efficient fluorescent powders that convert the UV emitted by the mercury plasma, into visible light. And since visible light is the most common application of lighting, then no discussion is complete without a review of how much light one is obtaining for a given amount of power. That term is efficacy, not efficiency (but very similar in its meaning). The measure is Lumen's per Watt. And if the total light (total lumen's) is too low for a particular installation, the typical solution is to add more bulbs and consume more power. [not a green choice]

The efficacy of fluorescent lamps ranges from about 85 to 95 lumen's per watt. LED technology and halogen technology both peak out at about the level of 95 lumen's per watt also. And neither LED or halogen technology requires mercury, but I can't be sure that the other lamp types constitute a palatable mixture I would be willing to ingest. That issue aside, lets talk about the grossly overlooked issues.

Regarding the amount of mercury used in a fluorescent lamp, the dose level has dropped very significantly since 1998 when the product wars were at the highest level of challenge. A lot of money was spent by one of the major lamp makers to market their product as an especially environmentally friendly product. This marketing push took advantage of the fear of mercury that most people seem to have. All the while, the same company was taking a huge risk that fear was easier to manipulate than the truth and they made huge investments in tooling changes to help bring this issue to the sales table. It was almost as if they had introduced a new product. But it was really the same old product in new clothes, for the most part.

The simple reality is this. If you took all of the fluorescent lamps in the world and added up all of the mercury released by the disposal of these lamps it would add up to less that 0.5% of the mercury released in the world by other processes. And while I agree that we should be good stewards of our environment, it is the mercury released by other processes that really gets past our attention. That is to say that while we are worrying about extinguishing a single candle, we may not have noticed that the house is on fire. It is not as ridiculous as it sounds.

A large portion of the energy we put into these various lamp products comes from consuming fossil fuels. Mercury occurs naturally in many places, including fossil fuels. So, if we burn two thousand pounds of coal to provide 3500 lumen's for a couple of years, then and only then are we in a position to do a life cycle analysis. If we provided that light from a single 40 Watt fluorescent lamp, then all it took was the burning of 2000 pounds of coal. If we provided the same amount of light with several incandescent lamps, we would have burnt 8000 pounds of coal over the same period. And because the life expectancy is so short on incandescent lamps, you will have to replace those bulbs about 8 to 10 times before the fluorescent lamp reaches its useful end of life.

When you examine how much mercury there is per pound of coal, you will soon realize that four times as much mercury (or CO2 and any other byproduct) is released into the atmosphere by operating incandescent lamps. And the primary push to eliminate incandescent lighting is all about CO2.

In fact, about 40% of the world wide mercury release comes from burning fossil fuels and another 40% comes from volcanic activity. Both of these issues are things we are not willing to control, yet they affect our environment in a much larger way.

So, it is important to "get it right" when looking at the life cycle of some product. Without the invention of fluorescent lighting we would have had to install larger generators, larger feed lines (cables) etc. and the carbon (and mercury) footprint would have been much larger than it is today.

As to the future of fluorescent lighting......I think the damage has been done when the fears of mercury were stoked in the name of marketing.

I believe the fluorescent lamp product is an environmentally friendly product when one takes into account all of the mercury released in generating the power to light up less efficient products like cheap incandescent lamps.

I believe that the future of LED lighting is very good because it provides a similarly efficient conversion of electricity into light. The cost of LED technology has dropped and it will continue to do so as new process come into being. That is what happened to fluorescent (and other types of) lighting. Machines that were designed for 1000 or 2000 lamps per hour are now cranking them out at 4000 to 6000 per hour at the insistence of management circles wanting more for nothing. Most improvements are made for the sake of higher profits (lower costs) than for introduction of innovative changes. And most of that comes from market pressure.

One other note: In Japan, the spent fluorescent lamp products are returned to the factory that made them. The processing facilities crush the lamp and yields about 80% of the glass (approximately 230 grams) that is washed to remove as much powder as reasonably possible and separated for remelting of the glass. The rest is a tangled collection of copper, iron, aluminum, nickle, tungsten, paper, glue in a limestone filler, and possibly a little brass. To the best of my knowledge, no one is using solder in fluorescent lamps. Don't need it. The rest of the inert components end up as land fill. What will we do when we run out of places that need to be filled?

Incidentally, the fluorescent power and glass don't mix well when recycling glass tubes. The powder will cause the glass to crack over time and temperature changes. As a result, there are not many products you would want to make from the recycled glass due to the incidental mixture.

By the way, if this was really a homework assignment, don't be surprised if this information is challenged. The power of using fear as a marketing tool has the uncanny effect of overwhelming common sense (which is really genius in working cloths....). The facts presented are a combination of serious research and some simple observations. Fact before fiction, but fiction is so much more exciting!