Proteus™

 

Kept close to the vest during its formative phases, development of Elation Professional’s IP65 Proteus line has been an experiential and fruitful journey.

 

It was early 2015 and Elation had gathered its worldwide engineering, product design, service and R&D personnel together in Los Angeles for a weeklong roundtable of debate, brainstorming and experiments to see how the company could push forward the engineering success gained from products such as the Platinum FLX into the realm of IP65.  

 

The talent was there among the thermal, mechanical, optical, electronic and software engineers present and the vision was clear – the creation of a truly reliable line of IP65-rated automated luminaires that would work under the harshest of conditions. The path to get there, however, was not.

 

Over the next several months, Elation would draft a well-thought-out development strategy complete with strategic goals, strengths, success measures, and challenges - all with the goal of launching a new brand of highest-quality ingress-protected products.

 

The challenges were substantial

The seeds were sown but a lot of hard work lay ahead – there was a steep learning curve to conquer, resources to evaluate and procure, tests to undergo, mistakes to correct and obstacles to overcome. Repetitive experiments would see a lot of wet and dusty professional engineers having their patience and dedication tested to the limit (as much as the hardware itself).

 

Elation head of R&D, Irek Skoczowski, was present for that group symposium, a key member of a development team whose close working relationship stretched across the Atlantic to Elation’s European office in Holland and an R&D department headed by Roger Hamers. “We knew the ‘why’ - that was driven by lighting designers, rental companies and our own sales team,” Irek recalls, “but what we didn’t know was the ‘how.’ How to develop a unit that could withstand the heat and sands of Dubai, Florida’s sweltering humidity or a freezing Austrian winter. The challenges were substantial.”

 

In the beginning

IP65 wasn’t completely new territory for the company however. Elation began delving into IP-rated products years earlier with the DLED and subsequent ELAR series. „I would call that the seed that started our path to the Proteus series,” says Elation service manager Gines Gines, another important member of Elation’s Proteus development team. „We found some of our early ELAR series fixtures in great operating condition years into use on maritime projects. That was important knowledge that we already had and helped us improve during the development stages with Proteus.” That early experience would aid in the development of marine-grade specifications for the Proteus line, providing greater resistance in corrosive saline environments.

 

Fully sealed

One obvious challenge that hardly needed mentioning but would come to consume nights of sleep was how to keep an automated lighting unit fully sealed. The first attempts were anything but successful. “The first sample was not only too bulky,” – it looked like something from pre-history according to Irek – “there were lots of leaks and condensation issues. When we got the first prototype, unscrewed the unit and opened it, that was it, we had to trash it. That was an early lesson in ingress protection – no screws into soft aluminium!” The solution proved to be helicoil inserts. “That was already a big improvement toward an IP65 solution.”

 

Early testing involved using inert gas to check for leaks, a method adopted from the automotive industry and its air conditioning systems. The approach helped improve sealing by determining what gasket design was best, as well as what material would provide the best seal and stand up to repeated use.

 

Humidity control

Properly sealing the unit would prove to be only one small step of many, however. Preventing water from entering the unit is one thing; dealing with condensation within the unit is another. “Condensed water will normally vaporize and exit through air valves but once cold weather experiments were undertaken, other issues arose,” remarks Roger Hamers from Elation R&D in Europe. “What we saw in very cold environments was condensed water that would tend to collect in certain areas of the unit. We isolated the issue and after considering several different methods to deal with it, we eventually made very precise hardware modifications, which enabled collection and retaining of the moisture until the light heats up and the water is released as vapour. The system proved effective and also provides extra protection for important internal components like PCBs.”

Humidity control, perhaps the biggest obstacle to overcome, had been perfected, or so Elation engineers thought. As the Proteus line expanded to include LED versions and their cooler, larger front lenses, condensation issues again reared its ugly head. “Because water condenses at the coldest place on a unit, often the front lens on an LED fixture, we noticed that it would sometimes fog up,” Roger continues. “In this case, we looked outside our industry, to the auto industry, to see how they dealt with a similar problem.” The solution, which involved inserting a fan and heating element to blow a warm film of air beneath the lens, ensures that lenses stay fog free.

 

Thinking long term

Progress felt slow but progress there was. A morning would be lost repairing a unit and replacing blown PCBs because a seal was half a millimeter too narrow, or a $1 connector failed. Even when individual problems were solved, the development team had to think long term - will it still work years down the line? How and where could it corrode? The experiments were hard, often frustrating, involved a lot of cleaning up and constant laundry. But, even in the early days, progress was being made by a development group collectively learning, growing and sharing knowledge.

 

Meanwhile, other issues popped up. When initial prototype units had motor problems due to overheating that led to overstepping, Elation’s software engineers were called on to modify the software system. And when an early pole gliding system for focus and zoom had issues in high heat environments, leading to overstepping and faster wear, a switch to a rail system with quality bearings and specially designed oils was implemented, a maintenance free solution that has worked well in all environments.

 

Lots of testing

Months passed with engineers modifying, changing, fixing, replacing and testing, lots of testing. In the meantime, Elation sales personnel began to scan their Rolodex of contacts in order to secure Proteus on real world applications all around the globe, with lessons learnt along the way. Dubai, for example, was one of the harsh test environments where units were exposed for months on end to an unrelenting sun, high winds, and sand storms. Naturally, once rescued from their desert torment, curious engineers wanted to know what was happening inside the units.

 

“Our concern was for the internal components and how we could get rid of all that heat,“ Irek says. „We drew on experience we had with our Platinum lamp fixtures and how to cool them but still it took us two full years to perfect the cooling system.“ Proteus uses an innovative cooling system of radiators and cooling ribs, which work with internal fans to transport heat out of the unit. To lower the heat stress further, the cooling system ensures that an even temperature is transported throughout the entire unit in order to avoid any internal hot spots. Additionally, at each step, acoustic levels were carefully measured to ensure that sound levels stayed as low as possible.

The environments that Proteus fixtures find themselves in are diverse. For fixtures exposed to high winds - for example on a skyscraper hundreds of meters above the ground - special wind tests are conducted that measure wind force tolerance. Other units undergo IK tests that measure lens impact levels, as well as 3G vibration testing. On top of that, fixtures are tested under CE, cETLus and IP65 certification and guidelines, along with other local testing when required.

 

The Elation lab

Other test environments are just as grueling including hot and humid Orlando, and rain and saltwater environs in China. Perhaps the harshest test however comes in Elation’s own lab. “We create harsher environments than a customer would use the product in. Basically, we run them and test them until we kill them,” says Irek while flashing that slightly devious look you only see from an unrestrained test engineer.

Following a thorough visual inspection, prototypes must endure a litany of tests. A special IP chamber showers, sprays, and blasts the unit from every angle imaginable; a heat room exposes it to temperatures up to 50°C (122° F); and a freezer all the way down to -40°C (-40°F). A trip out onto the roof of the Elation facility sees further tortures. Tests also include exposure to other substances a unit may encounter in real world environments like chlorine (swimming pools), bromine (spas) and large cups of beer (any festival).

 

Sun protection

Not all testing uncovers real world problems however. One example is from an early test site where direct sun shining through the lens of a unit caused damage to internal components, an issue that engineers hadn’t originally foreseen. „The sun had shone through the lens to create an exceptionally narrow beam into the unit, similar to a laser, and it burned some components in seconds,“ Roger Hamers recounts. „We thought we had covered everything but it just goes to show how important real world testing is.“ The solution involved a combination of software and hardware modifications - a sun protection mode that uses sensors to tell the unit to position itself away from the sun in combination with special sealing plates that protect belts, fans and valves.

Other tests would uncover other potential weaknesses. Drop tests, for example, found that certain housing and bracketry construction needed slight tweaking, and other improvements were made to seemingly banal things like wiring systems and power sockets. „We learned a lot from those early prototype units, especially the Proteus Hybrid, and avoided those problems on following units,“ Irek says.

 

I want to see bubbles!

As the proverb goes, necessity is the mother of invention and with units being opened and closed in Elation R&D on a daily basis, a high-quality IP Tester was a necessity for the testing team. „The IP testers on the market could only vacuum test, which isn’t good enough, so we ended up making our own IP Tester that can test for both vacuum and pressure leaks,“ explains Roger Hamers. „But why should it do both? With a vaccum only tester, water is sucked into the fixture and it is hard to isolate where the leak is. There are problems you would never find with only a vaccum test, like leaks in a membrane. I want to see bubbles! We also pressurize the unit so that you can see bubbles and more easily identify where the leak is.“ Again, Elation had looked to the automotive industry for inspiration on an innovative solution.

Giant step

That initial roundtable discussion sparked the evolution of an industry-leading product line that has kept Elation at the forefront of IP-rated fixture development ever since. Eric Loader, Sales and Marketing Director at Elation Professional, was at that symposium and reflects on the journey. „It's been a challenging task all along the way for sure but nothing great comes easy, does it? The hard work and dedication our team puts into developing these world-class products ensures customers realize their vision while making sure their projects are successful from start to finish. It has been a giant step forward for our company but for our industry as well.”