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Registered Member #53
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:31AM
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 638
O.O
I have never had this happen before but I have had bulbs blow out inside the bulb quiet violently. I wonder if this is because you guys are on 240 and I'm on 120.
Registered Member #1617
Joined: Fri Aug 01 2008, 07:31AM
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Posts: 139
All light bulbs have a "Ballotini fuse" but in some of them it fails to blow properly, in which case either the breaker trips or the bulb explodes.
Ok you got me thinking, so I took down a still operational, unexploded globe of the same manufacturer and type (phillips 100w made in Indonesia). Here is a photo:
refering to this website it dosent look like these globes have any fusing at all, also notice how the leads running up throught the glass support in the middle appear to have been vapourizing and producing a dark coloured condensate on the glass surface. It would seem that maybe the lead wires running up to the filament slowly vapourize (why this 'feature' would be added is anyones guess, Like Harry said No one would make any money out of an everlasting light bulb!), and when fillament faliure finally occurs, the high peak current explodes whats left of the leads.
Also further down it says :
"When the fuses fail, a secondary arc can form between the broken fuse wires and the metal shell of the cap. The heat it produces causes the trapped volume of air inside the cap to expand, elevating its pressure to the kind of levels found in a car tyre. If the quality of the capping cement has deteriorated over life, the glass part of the bulb will be forcibly ejected like a bullet, leaving its metal cap hanging in the luminaire. It is accompanied by a shower of sparks, with the possibility for personal injury or fire."
Anyway I cant find incandescent globes in any normal shops any more, so as each remaining incandescent in my house explodes, I wil replace it with an 'energy saving' globe, which appear so far to be not quite as exciting.
Registered Member #162
Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 10:25AM
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 3141
I noticed this kind of 'explosive' failure mode recently (10 yrs) too, I think it's because 'old-fashioned' filament bulbs used a vacuum, modern/cheap bulbs use partial vacuum and an inert gas. (I imagine that a small arc forms in the fractured filament where the chemically inert gas can be ionised, The arc will grow and maybe replace the filament, and as sgtc-ers know, an arc has lower resistance than a filament of wire!) (just thought of this so could be rubbish!!!)
The degree of failure is probably just different levels of manufacturing 'economy'. I guess most filament lamps fail at turn-on due to the sudden stress of 10x (or whatever) normal current
Filament lamps in uk have never to my knowledge incorporated any deliberate fusing device.
Registered Member #1262
Joined: Fri Jan 25 2008, 05:22AM
Location: Maryland, USA
Posts: 451
Only explosive failure of a light bulb I've ever had was a few years ago. I had a cup of cold water fall off a shelf and splash directly onto a lamp with a 100 watt bulb. Not suprisingly, it exploded in a small shower of glass and went out a few seconds later. See for Adam Savage doing that with a spray bottle.
I've never seen a bulb do this spontainiously though, so this is quite interesting.
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Unusual lightglobe faliure mode
