Timed charge-up and illumination
AssigneeCooper Technologies Company
InventorsWestly Davis Hetrick, Daniel Leland Bragg
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Exit and egress lighting, emergency lighting or emergency light fixture, having internal supercapacitor power sources are recharged after a power outage using a staggered power up process. For example, once an emergency light fixture detects a power-on transition from power being unavailable on a power source to power being available from the power source, the fixture waits a predetermined time to recharge a supercapacitor based on a charge time delay value. The predetermined time may be selected to be unique for one or several emergency light fixtures so as to distribute a combined peak power demand of the fixtures. After the predetermined time has expired, the supercapacitor is electrically coupled to a power source to in order to recharge the supercapacitor.
Claims20
A method for timed charge-up of a power storage device used with a light source, the method comprising:
- detecting a power-on transition corresponding to power from the power source being unavailable to the power from the power source being available;
- providing the power from the power source to a power storage device after waiting a time period from the detecting of the power-on transition;
- and
- charging the power storage device with the power from the power source.
An illumination apparatus, comprising:
- a housing;
- a switch disposed within the housing and coupled to a power source via a power distribution network;
- a power storage device disposed within the housing and coupled to the switch;
- a register disposed within the housing, wherein the register stores a charge time delay value;
- and
- a controller disposed within the housing, wherein the controller controls the switch to electrically couple the power source to the power storage device based on the charge time delay value.
An illumination system, comprising:
- a power distribution network coupled to a power source;
- and
- a plurality of lighting fixtures coupled to the power distribution network, wherein each respective lighting fixture of the plurality of lighting fixtures includes a power storage device, a controller, and a delay register that stores a charge time delay value for the respective lighting fixture and wherein the controller of each respective lighting fixture of the plurality of lighting fixtures is configured to:
- detect a power-on transition corresponding to power from the power source being unavailable to the power from the power source being available;
- and
- couple the power source to the power storage device of the respective lighting fixture after waiting a respective time period from detection of the power-on transition by the controller of the respective lighting fixture, wherein the respective time period depends on the charge time delay value for the respective lighting fixture.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.