Carl Claudius Johannes Hardt née Noack

• One of the main global challenges is how we deal with current environmental issues which are amplified by the industrialization of large emerging economies like China and India, as well as the progressing depletion of natural resources. It is only natural that universities and other public institutions with an outreach to many members of society and in the position to transfer the forefront of new technologies to real application to mitigate environmental burdens. The goal of this PhD project has been to develop an engineering-based strategy to address the energy by focusing on one of the emerging technologies, in order to reduce the energy consumption significantly by quantum leap improvements of the energy efficiency. The technology chosen for this purpose is the LED (light emitting diode) technology, which enables improvement of the energy efficiency for lighting by a factor of 2 – 10, depending on the exact circumstances. The objective of this study and the research topics are focused on all aspects of applications engineering and other issues regarding the introduction of the new technology. These range from pure technical issues to economic and user perception issues. As a first step, a suite of test procedures has been developed which characterize user relevant characteristics. As the next step a rating scale has been developed for each of the technical tests, to enable a benchmarking of tested LED devices with respect to a particular application. This rating scale and an algorithm to convert the results from hundreds of different tested LED into an aggregated “figure of merit” for a particular application for each particular application has been tested and found highly acceptable and useful in the context of applications engineering projects, which have been part of this PhD project as a validation of the methods developed. The scope of this project to investigate how to facilitate new technologies with the aim of reducing the environmental burden has bee