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ME Super High Pressure Mercury
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Updated
22-VII-2006 |
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Mercury Vapour lamps operating at super high pressure with more than 100 watts per centimetre of arc length are classified as the ME style. Mercury pressure can be between approximately 25-250 atmospheres and there is often a requirement for forced air cooling directly on the arc tube surface.
ME lamps followed on from the development of the MD water cooled style, the significant difference being that performance has been lowered to the point where water cooling is no longer required. Coupled with the much longer useful life, this makes them a much more attractive option than MD systems, which in general proved far too expensive to operate.
The ME family started with the first lamp shown below, a 250W compact source lamp created by Osram-GEC with spherical arc tube. Later, BTH Mazda improved on the concept by optimising the arc tube shape for the vertical burning position, filled the arc tube with neon, and added an auxiliary electrode to make the lamp self-starting. ME lamps were produced in a wide variety of sizes from 100W up to 25,000W, frequently with the addition of cadmium to the arc tube to increase the red ratio (then termed MEC lamps). More recently the single ended lamps shown here have been largely superseded by double-ended designs such as the Osram HBO series, which continue to find applications where a compact ultra-violet source of high power is required - for instance in the photolithographic exposure in the manufacture of semiconductor devices.
For general projection the ME lamp was completely superseded by short arc metal halide technology several decades ago. But curiously in recent years, the pure mercury discharge has re-emerged as perhaps the most important discharge projection lamp of the future. A pure mercury arc can be made much shorter than the metal halide type, and by operating in the region of 200 atmospheres reasonable colour rendering properties can be achieved. An entire new ultra-high pressure mercury generation is being created for digital video projectors. |
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Osram |
250W |
| ME/D Compact Source Glass 3-Pin style |
| 1959 |
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Mazda |
250W |
| ME/D Compact Source Glass 3-Pin style |
| 1963 |
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Thorn |
250W |
| ME/D Compact Source Glass Pre-focus style |
| 1980 |
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Osram |
250W |
| ME/D Compact Source Metal box 3-Pin style |
| 1964 |
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Mazda |
250W |
| ME/D Compact Source Metal box Prefocus style |
| 1950 |
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Osira |
500W |
| ME/H Bombing Teacher Glass Pre-focus style |
| 1945 |
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Westinghouse |
250W |
| SAH-250B Short Arc DC Mercury |
| 1942 |
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Osram |
3500W |
| HBO deep UV source for semiconductr fabrication |
| 2000 |
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Philips |
120W |
| UHP 120W projector First Generation lamp |
| 1995 |
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Philips |
120W |
| UHP 120W for LCD Video Projector |
| 2001 |
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