FFT based investigations on light flicker in new lighting systems

These days we live the transition in home and public lighting to Solid State Lighting (SSL) and possible others as Organic LED (OLED) and new developed gas discharge lamps as Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps (CCFL). Most of the new lamps are marketed to be retrofitted in existing sockets for luminaires as E14 or E27. Beside major benefits on energy consumption and environment protection, there are some concerns about the biological and psychological effects of light flicker produced by these new lamps, especially in the SSL case [1]. We mention here the effects that range from fatigue to headache and epilepsy. We propose in this paper a quantitative investigation on flicker, based on FFT of the acquired photometric data. This way, not only the flicker amplitude, but also the frequency and the human perception is taken into account. Based on the proposed processing, different lamps with different technologies and flicker level are consistently compared.