SBIR-STTR Award

The Conventional Lighting Integrated Circuit Management (CLICM) technology proposed will provide integrated circuit protection functions, switching functions, internal and external circuit monitoring functions, diming functions, communications, and remote control capability in a single retrofit-able module. Designed to be able to integrate with on-going developments in remote source lighting computer control and communications architectures, the technology will provide for greatly expanded control and monitoring of conventional lighting in shipboard environments. Designed to be modular and scalable, the technology when fully implemented will be installed in place of circuit breaker distribution panels, switches, and other add-on functional equipment. The technology specifically provides for remote computer control and monitoring, and will be configured for stand-alone installation into non-LAN backbone ships, or to be fully integrated into shipboard LAN architectures. Benefit This effort will enable the US NAvy to empower its personnel to perform more effectively and safely than is possible today. It will reduce the cost of installing lighting distribution panels and illumination control, while improving on the control, reliability and information available on the circuitry, internal and external. Commerical applications may include standard intelligent breakers that provide improved levels of switching control, added functionality, improved operating reliability, safety, and health monitoring of the switching/circuit protection features and external circuitry. Keywords Modularized Integrated Lighting Distribution Panels, Computer Controlled Conventional Lighting, Solid State Circuit Protection and Control

The development of a ship wide integrated, modular, divisible, flexible, and fully distributed lighting control system will create significant construction and manpower savings in shipboard applications, while at the same time enabling US Navy vessels to meet new high temp operations that employ rapidly re-configurable lighting technologies successfully and safely. The proposed system will enable single point of control of ship-wide lighting configuration changes as required from normal lighting to darken ship or to NVD. In Phase I C3I Inc of Hampton demonstrated the feasibility of an Advanced Lgihting System (ALS) Capable of meeting these requirements. This base control was developed and tested on board the USS SeaFighter. The individual control modules containing the flexible addres structure, communicaton algorithms, control algorithms, and the design of various lighting technology drivers were built and integrated into the ALS. A Visual Landing Aid (VLA) Graphical user interface was designed and demonstrated. For this Phase II project, C3I Inc will pursue the advanced development and testing of the prototype architecture and equipment and will add several new lighting control and lighting driver capabilities, and add the capability to add other related, but not necessarily lighting technologies, to the system. The designs will be optimized, fabricated, engineered for full scale production, fully tested and made ready for full DoN shipboard operational applicaton. The completed designs will be verified and validated, and made ready for turnkey shipboard installations. Several new GUI capabilities will be added, including the ability to add pages to the control system without the requirement to re-code the software. This capability will provide the ship configuration manager the ability to maintain the configuration of the vessels lighting system in-house.

Keywords:
Advanced Lighting Systems, Shipboard Advanced Lighting Systems, Integrated Lighting Control, Modular Lighting, Intensity And Frequency Lighting Contro