Evaluation of Luminous Performance and Lifetime of CFL in the Regime of Intermittent Use

This paper presents a methodology to evaluate the luminous efficiency and lifetime of the CFL. The variables analyzed are voltage, current, ambience temperature, relative humidity and finally the luminous flux to check the variations of illuminance in time. Measurements were made in a real scenario, in this case the residences, considering that is more aggressive than the laboratory testing. The performance of CFL and other variables measured were related to the consumer profile, because the behavior and consumer knowledge define the usage of CFL. Then, the switching was analyzed due to that the determination of life varies depending on the switching cycles (on-off). Later, test standards used by other countries were analyzed and compared with the standards of Brazil, in order to verify whether tests related to switching cycles and useful lifetime are similar or completely different.