LED Museum Lighting: Back to Natural Light

Article overviews prospects of application of adjustable polychrome LED luminaires based on RGB mixture principle for museum lighting. Such light sources allow creating of high-quality lighting systems with capability to adjust luminous flux and chromaticity characteristics with a wide range of correlated colour temperatures between 2800 K and 6500 K and high values of all colour rendering indexes: R1-R14. Application of adjustable LED light sources makes it possible to do artificial museum lighting similar to natural environment at the moment of creating of a piece of art by an artist, hence, to make its perception more precise. Possibility to adjust the correlated colour temperature allows creating individual lighting of paintings in compliance with the genre and subject of a work (a portrait, a landscape, time period, etc.). The article also briefly describes major theoretical, circuit design and software aspects of creation of a dynamically adjustable LED system of museum lighting and gives first examples of its application.