Kevin J. Dowling

The design of a spectrally tunable light source

Color Rendering Index, CRI, is a widely used metric to provide a means of determining light quality using measured color shift from a reference source. CRI has several known deficiencies however and there is active research in new metrics. As part of this research, a new tool has been developed to create a wide variety of spectral power distributions, SPD. The tool is called a Spectrally Tunable Light Source, STLS. We detail objectives and the detailed design of an STLS system involving thousands of high-power LEDs across the visible spectrum.