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Blowing Light Bulb..

P

Palindrome

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi,

An interesting thing happened in the drawing room tonight.. a standard
40W incandescent lamp failed as I switched the room lights on.

What I saw was a bright flash and a red/white hot something leave the
wall lamp and travel some 8 foot to the floor.

The circuit fuse blew.

The lamp has a darning-needle sized round hole (large pin hole) in the
glass, with a rounded/melted edge. The inside of the glass has a patch
of dark discolouration opposite the hole.

Anyone ever heard of anything like that happening?

It must have produced an incredibly hot and high speed fragment to have
been able to melt through the glass quickly enough to still have the
speed to travel that distance across the room.
 
A

Andrew Gabriel

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi,

An interesting thing happened in the drawing room tonight.. a standard
40W incandescent lamp failed as I switched the room lights on.

What I saw was a bright flash and a red/white hot something leave the
wall lamp and travel some 8 foot to the floor.

The circuit fuse blew.

The lamp has a darning-needle sized round hole (large pin hole) in the
glass, with a rounded/melted edge. The inside of the glass has a patch
of dark discolouration opposite the hole.

Anyone ever heard of anything like that happening?

It must have produced an incredibly hot and high speed fragment to have
been able to melt through the glass quickly enough to still have the
speed to travel that distance across the room.

Interesting -- probably a melted end of one of the lead-in
wires. Is one of them shorter and missing the end?

Some years ago I had a 60W lamp go with a bang and the glass
fell off having cracked around the neck. The glass bulb then
bounced on a hard floor and didn't break.
 
V

Victor Roberts

Jan 1, 1970
0
Its rare, but its possible. Most bulbs fail when the filament
evaporates, develops a weak spot and thermal stress (usually the surge
when turning on a cold lamp) finishes the job. This is a relatively low
energy event, since the arc, in series with the remaining filament
limits the current.

Its possible for the filament and/or supporting wires to fail
structurally and result in a short circuit inside the bulb. That will
dissipate quite a bit of energy by comparison and possibly trip the
branch circuit protection. The folks on sci.engr.lighting might be able
to shed some more light on this.

It is my understanding that internal arcs are rather common
when incandescent lamps fail and that the arcs can draw
substantially more current than the filament. For that
reason incandescent lamps (at least in the US) have an
internal fuse wire that is supposed to keep the branch
circuit fuse or breaker from opening.

I suspect the object that melted through the glass was part
of the filament or support lead that was melted by the arc.

I have never seen an incandescent lamp blow a branch circuit
breaker or fuse. Terry has more experience in this area and
may be able to shed more light on the subject.

--
Vic Roberts
http://www.RobertsResearchInc.com
To reply via e-mail:
replace xxx with vdr in the Reply to: address
or use e-mail address listed at the Web site.

This information is provided for educational purposes only.
It may not be used in any publication or posted on any Web
site without written permission.
 
P

Paul Hovnanian P.E.

Jan 1, 1970
0
Palindrome said:
Hi,

An interesting thing happened in the drawing room tonight.. a standard
40W incandescent lamp failed as I switched the room lights on.

What I saw was a bright flash and a red/white hot something leave the
wall lamp and travel some 8 foot to the floor.

The circuit fuse blew.

The lamp has a darning-needle sized round hole (large pin hole) in the
glass, with a rounded/melted edge. The inside of the glass has a patch
of dark discolouration opposite the hole.

Anyone ever heard of anything like that happening?

It must have produced an incredibly hot and high speed fragment to have
been able to melt through the glass quickly enough to still have the
speed to travel that distance across the room.
Its rare, but its possible. Most bulbs fail when the filament
evaporates, develops a weak spot and thermal stress (usually the surge
when turning on a cold lamp) finishes the job. This is a relatively low
energy event, since the arc, in series with the remaining filament
limits the current.

Its possible for the filament and/or supporting wires to fail
structurally and result in a short circuit inside the bulb. That will
dissipate quite a bit of energy by comparison and possibly trip the
branch circuit protection. The folks on sci.engr.lighting might be able
to shed some more light on this.
 
A

Andrew Gabriel

Jan 1, 1970
0
Have heard it referred to as Ballotini (sp?) fuse in the lamp pinch ,

Ballotini (Italian: small balls;-) is one of the types of
fuse used where the fusewire is in a tube filled with tiny
glass balls to cool and quench the arc quickly.
These are common, but so are bare fusewire fuses.
but thought it was to protect the lamp from non passive failure as
experienced by the OP.



Seen plenty of larger incans,mainly theatre lamps anything from 300W
to 2K typically, destroy fuse and triac when they go.

It's quite common in the UK where we commonly use dual element
circuit breakers, and the magnetic (fault current) element
trips faster than a lamp base fuse. It's rare when the branch
circuit protection is provided by a real fuse.
 
| I have never seen an incandescent lamp blow a branch circuit
| breaker or fuse. Terry has more experience in this area and
| may be able to shed more light on the subject.

I had a "mini chandelier" pendant lamp with 3 bulbs blow all three once.
It tripped the breaker when it did that. One of the bulbs suffered very
catastrophic failure, with the glass cracked and the entire inside all
blackened. The other two bulbs looked like just blown. Very little of
the filament could be seen remaining of quite a lot they had (25 watts).
Additionally, all 3 bulbs suffered melting in the screw part of the base,
with the bulb most affected having the most. It looks like they did not
have good enough contact in the base to support the fault current and an
arc formed between base and socket.

There was only one loud pop sound. I don't know for sure if they all went
at exactly the same time, but it sounded like it. But I wonder if the arc
in the first bulb went out before zero crossing, leaving enough current to
surge the other two and blow them.
 
T

TKM

Jan 1, 1970
0
Paul Hovnanian P.E. said:
Its rare, but its possible. Most bulbs fail when the filament
evaporates, develops a weak spot and thermal stress (usually the surge
when turning on a cold lamp) finishes the job. This is a relatively low
energy event, since the arc, in series with the remaining filament
limits the current.

Its possible for the filament and/or supporting wires to fail
structurally and result in a short circuit inside the bulb. That will
dissipate quite a bit of energy by comparison and possibly trip the
branch circuit protection. The folks on sci.engr.lighting might be able
to shed some more light on this.

Some years ago, I worked in a test lab where such phenomena were studied to
help customers with the design of lamp circuits and, especially, electronic
dimmers. As others have said, such dimmers are often the fuse when a lamp
filament fails.

We caused the lamp to fail by using clear lamps and focusing a laser on
various parts of the filament. There may even have been a paper on the
results and I'll take a look through the old LS proceedings to see if I can
find it.

But what I recall is that the fireworks inside the lamp were mainly a
function of the point in the sine wave cycle when the filament opened and
the "stiffness" of the power supply feeding the lamp. By "stiffness" I mean
the ability of the circuit to quickly increase the lamp current. Break
the filament just as the current wave was building in a circuit with plenty
of current capacity and you had a chance for some spectacular lamp failures
because of the arc that got started between the internal lamp parts. The
most powerful arcs were between the filament mounts, but more usually
between a piece of filament and one of the mounts. As Vic said, the fuse
wire in one of the leads usually limited the duration of the arc, but fuses
are not precise devices and there were often pieces of molten metal flying
around inside the bulb and embedding themselves into the glass surface.

I'll guess that in the case Paul mentions above, a gas-filled lamp is
involved and the filament arcs just at the right time and place to position
a hot pocket of gas such that the filament melts and turns into a miniature
rocket. I'm curious to know what the piece of material that hit the floor
looked like. Did it still resemble a piece of filament or was it just a
solidified blob of molten metal.

I also wonder if internal lamp arcs have the potential to be more powerful
on 50 Hz systems since there is more time for the arc to start and heat up
in a single cycle than on 60 Hz systems.

Terry McGowan
 
D

Don Klipstein

Jan 1, 1970
0
Palindrome said:
Hi,

An interesting thing happened in the drawing room tonight.. a standard
40W incandescent lamp failed as I switched the room lights on.

What I saw was a bright flash and a red/white hot something leave the
wall lamp and travel some 8 foot to the floor.

The circuit fuse blew.

The lamp has a darning-needle sized round hole (large pin hole) in the
glass, with a rounded/melted edge. The inside of the glass has a patch
of dark discolouration opposite the hole.

Anyone ever heard of anything like that happening?

It must have produced an incredibly hot and high speed fragment to have
been able to melt through the glass quickly enough to still have the
speed to travel that distance across the room.

What I suspect happened, before I get much into this thread:

The lamp (lightbulb, that is) had a reasonably normal cold-start burnout
with a "burnout arc" forming across the developing break in the filament
and "blowing up" to quickly move and grow to have its terminations being
the ends of the filament. With hardly any filament material in series
with the arc, there is not much to limit its current.

One thing about most arcs: As you feed them more current, they become
more conductive, often even disproportionately. Sometimes as a good
explanation and sometimes to maybe usually as an oversimplified one,
higher current makes an arc hotter, and higher current increases the
percentage of the atoms in the arc being ionized.

So when a "burnout arc" forms in an incandescent lamp and "blows up", it
is limited by any of the following:

1) A fusible link in one of the wires in the lamp (lightbulb) serves as a
fuse and blows.

2) The branch circuit's fuse/breaker blows/trips.

3) The arc dies during the next zero crossing of the line voltage,
preferably before it gets *Really Bad* if 1 or 2 does not occur first.

I have heard of complaints of some incandescent lamps lacking fusible
links in their internal wires. The usual complaint of those is that
burnout arcs draw current surges that blow fuses/pop breakers, ruin
dimmers, or cause the wiring in the lamps (lightbulbs) to vaporize
internal glue (or whatever gets vaporized) and bulbs get popped from their
bases by the pressure of this vapor.
Thankfully, such problems are rare! I would hope that manufacturers
that "cheap out" by not including those fusible links lose sales as a
result!

Now for what else could happen:

I did once overvoltage a 500 watt photographic lamp (ECT), as in
giving about or slightly over 140 volts to a 110-120V 3200K 500 watt unit.
The filament broke from melting, and without a big bright flash, and
apparently one end of one half of the freshly broken hot filament touched
and melted through the glass bulb material.

The glass bulb got a small hole melted into it. The filament did not
get stuck to the bulb, although I do have memory traces of other incidents
where filament fragments stuck to the inner surface of a bulb.

One more datum: In the above incident with an ECT photoflood lamp, the
lamp was powered up without overvoltage and the voltage was increased
gradually over several seconds.

Back to your 40W incandescent:

I suspect that, if your symptoms did indeed occur as you described, you
had some extremely rare bad burnout where a piece of hot filament (or
molten portion thereof) both broke away and melted through the bulb.

I consider this improbable and at most very rare, since I have yet to
hear of this or experience it, even after spending a goodly chunk of my
youth as "The Mad Lamp Abuser"!

Having a burned out lamp (lightbulb) with an actual melted hole showing
signs of being made by an exiting small hot object sounds like strong
evidence to me. If I ever had such a thing, I would find a way to make an
arrangement to loan it to the manufacturer so that they can use it for
feedback but then I get back such a rarity. If the lamp was of a brand or
model easily identifiable as subpar, especially if purchased from a dollar
store, then my next move would be to find out if my municipality, county
and state has fire marshalls and report this to every fire marshall
possible. I would also report it to the Consumer Product Safety
Commission.

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])
 
P

Palindrome

Jan 1, 1970
0
Andrew said:
Ballotini (Italian: small balls;-) is one of the types of
fuse used where the fusewire is in a tube filled with tiny
glass balls to cool and quench the arc quickly.
These are common, but so are bare fusewire fuses.




It's quite common in the UK where we commonly use dual element
circuit breakers, and the magnetic (fault current) element
trips faster than a lamp base fuse. It's rare when the branch
circuit protection is provided by a real fuse.


This was a plain old-fashioned rewireable fuse. No trace of the original
fuse wire, except under the washers at ech end.

Looking at the lamp:

Everything seems present including most of the filament. The end of one
third of which seems to be "welded" to an intermediate support. Ditto
for another third. And what appears to be the remaining third is lying
loose inside.

There are several other marks that look like metal droplets embedded
in the glass, on the inside. So, it looks like molten metal was sent in
many directions, one droplet only getting through the glass.

No trace in the carpet of what came out. Hardly surprising, it would
have been pretty small.

No fusible link is apparent.


I must admit to still being very puzzled over exactly what happened. The
glass is intact, appart from the pin hole.

I wish I could take decent photos that I could show you - I have never
seen anything remotely like this before.
 
D

Don Klipstein

Jan 1, 1970
0
We caused the lamp to fail by using clear lamps and focusing a laser on
various parts of the filament. There may even have been a paper on the
results and I'll take a look through the old LS proceedings to see if I can
find it.

Did you induce failure while the filament was hot? That will severely
limit the arc current, until the arc expands/crawls/blows-up around the
filament.

I suspect the arc could expand faster if the filament breaks from an
"end-of-life cold start failure" where most of the filament has not yet
reached its normal steady-state temperature.

Then again, as I understand it, most cold start failures have most of
the filament achieving a peak temperature most of the way to their
steady-state operating temperature.

But if you had a way to apply power and then sever the filament late in
the first half of a half cycle, then you would have an "acid test"
(test reasonably able to match or exceed the severity of *The Really
Especially Bad* filed failures).

On the other hand, I have seen some stable burnout arcs!

1. I have heard of this occurring with 120V T3 halogen lamps used in
torchiere fixtures. I have even seen one failed T3 lamp in such a fixture
that showed severe bulb blackening around the break.

2) I have seen a 60W 120V A19 with a stable burnout arc in progress. The
filament was a C-9 (the multi-supported C-shaped one with singly coiled
wire). The lamp operated 24/7 and I give slight chance that it could have
developed an unstable burnout arc, and greater chance that it would have
developed a stable burnout arc that gets broken by
cold-start-burnout-related filament movement, if it failed during a cold
start.

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])
 
P

Palindrome

Jan 1, 1970
0
Don said:
What I suspect happened, before I get much into this thread:

The lamp (lightbulb, that is) had a reasonably normal cold-start burnout
with a "burnout arc" forming across the developing break in the filament
and "blowing up" to quickly move and grow to have its terminations being
the ends of the filament. With hardly any filament material in series
with the arc, there is not much to limit its current.

One thing about most arcs: As you feed them more current, they become
more conductive, often even disproportionately. Sometimes as a good
explanation and sometimes to maybe usually as an oversimplified one,
higher current makes an arc hotter, and higher current increases the
percentage of the atoms in the arc being ionized.

So when a "burnout arc" forms in an incandescent lamp and "blows up", it
is limited by any of the following:

1) A fusible link in one of the wires in the lamp (lightbulb) serves as a
fuse and blows.

2) The branch circuit's fuse/breaker blows/trips.

3) The arc dies during the next zero crossing of the line voltage,
preferably before it gets *Really Bad* if 1 or 2 does not occur first.

I have heard of complaints of some incandescent lamps lacking fusible
links in their internal wires. The usual complaint of those is that
burnout arcs draw current surges that blow fuses/pop breakers, ruin
dimmers, or cause the wiring in the lamps (lightbulbs) to vaporize
internal glue (or whatever gets vaporized) and bulbs get popped from their
bases by the pressure of this vapor.
Thankfully, such problems are rare! I would hope that manufacturers
that "cheap out" by not including those fusible links lose sales as a
result!

Now for what else could happen:

I did once overvoltage a 500 watt photographic lamp (ECT), as in
giving about or slightly over 140 volts to a 110-120V 3200K 500 watt unit.
The filament broke from melting, and without a big bright flash, and
apparently one end of one half of the freshly broken hot filament touched
and melted through the glass bulb material.

The glass bulb got a small hole melted into it. The filament did not
get stuck to the bulb, although I do have memory traces of other incidents
where filament fragments stuck to the inner surface of a bulb.

One more datum: In the above incident with an ECT photoflood lamp, the
lamp was powered up without overvoltage and the voltage was increased
gradually over several seconds.

Back to your 40W incandescent:

I suspect that, if your symptoms did indeed occur as you described, you
had some extremely rare bad burnout where a piece of hot filament (or
molten portion thereof) both broke away and melted through the bulb.

I consider this improbable and at most very rare, since I have yet to
hear of this or experience it, even after spending a goodly chunk of my
youth as "The Mad Lamp Abuser"!

Having a burned out lamp (lightbulb) with an actual melted hole showing
signs of being made by an exiting small hot object sounds like strong
evidence to me. If I ever had such a thing, I would find a way to make an
arrangement to loan it to the manufacturer so that they can use it for
feedback but then I get back such a rarity. If the lamp was of a brand or
model easily identifiable as subpar, especially if purchased from a dollar
store, then my next move would be to find out if my municipality, county
and state has fire marshalls and report this to every fire marshall
possible. I would also report it to the Consumer Product Safety
Commission.

It's a Lyvia.

http://www.dencon.co.uk/

Pay for the shipping and it's yours - if your curiosity is really
over-powering. You could probably sell it on Ebay if such an event is so
rare..
 
P

Palindrome

Jan 1, 1970
0
Don said:
Web page comes up looking to me like low relavance...

It's the (only) web page of the company that produces/markets them. You
wrote, "If the lamp was of a brand or model easily identifiable, etc"
and the page both identifies the company and shows that it is, "members
of both ASTA and BSI and hold accreditation to ISO9002"
Meanwhile, if this is in UK or anywhere else with mains voltage around
230V, burnout arcs can get worse than in USA (where I am at) where the
mains voltage is nominally 120V for most household circuits.
I realised that you were not from these parts. However, the offer is
there for you to acquire this light bulb to act as a conversation piece
for years to come. Like you, I wouldn't have believed it if, I hadn't
actually seen it happen and/or seen the lamp in question.

I still can't believe the physics of how a tiny hole can be melted
through the glass by a fragemnt of filament that, apparently, wasn't
slowed hardly at all in the process..Exploding lamps - yes. This..?

Devonshire pixies at work, as someone said...
 
V

Victor Roberts

Jan 1, 1970
0
On Tue, 15 May 2007 23:30:20 GMT, Palindrome

[snip]

Looking at the lamp:

Everything seems present including most of the filament. The end of one
third of which seems to be "welded" to an intermediate support. Ditto
for another third. And what appears to be the remaining third is lying
loose inside.

There are several other marks that look like metal droplets embedded
in the glass, on the inside. So, it looks like molten metal was sent in
many directions, one droplet only getting through the glass.

No trace in the carpet of what came out. Hardly surprising, it would
have been pretty small.

No fusible link is apparent.

The link is typically one of the lead wires from the base to
the filament supports. It looks like a normal uninsulated
wire.
I must admit to still being very puzzled over exactly what happened. The
glass is intact, appart from the pin hole.

I wish I could take decent photos that I could show you - I have never
seen anything remotely like this before.

--
Vic Roberts
http://www.RobertsResearchInc.com
To reply via e-mail:
replace xxx with vdr in the Reply to: address
or use e-mail address listed at the Web site.

This information is provided for educational purposes only.
It may not be used in any publication or posted on any Web
site without written permission.
 
C

cupra

Jan 1, 1970
0
Palindrome said:
It's the (only) web page of the company that produces/markets them.
You wrote, "If the lamp was of a brand or model easily identifiable,
etc" and the page both identifies the company and shows that it is,
"members of both ASTA and BSI and hold accreditation to ISO9002"
I realised that you were not from these parts. However, the offer is
there for you to acquire this light bulb to act as a conversation
piece for years to come. Like you, I wouldn't have believed it if, I
hadn't actually seen it happen and/or seen the lamp in question.

I still can't believe the physics of how a tiny hole can be melted
through the glass by a fragemnt of filament that, apparently, wasn't
slowed hardly at all in the process..Exploding lamps - yes. This..?

Devonshire pixies at work, as someone said...

Yep - I can assure you that the Somerset clan are just as troublesome!
 
| Probably this is a dumb question, but:
|
| I know NFPA now requires arc fault breakers for some circuits in the
| US, but I went overseas before I actually saw one used.
|
| Will a light bulb arc trip an arc fault breaker?

Never say never, but generally very unlikely. I've seen one case of a
bulb burnout trip a regular breaker. Presumably had that been an arc
fault breaker, it would still be tripped at least for the overload part
of the fault. An arc fault breaker generally includes GFCI protection
as well as traditional magnetic and thermal overload protection.
 
| On May 18, 3:44 pm, [email protected] wrote:
|> | Probably this is a dumb question, but:
|> |
|> | I know NFPA now requires arc fault breakers for some circuits in the
|> | US, but I went overseas before I actually saw one used.
|> |
|> | Will a light bulb arc trip an arc fault breaker?
|>
|> Never say never, but generally very unlikely. I've seen one case of a
|> bulb burnout trip a regular breaker. Presumably had that been an arc
|> fault breaker, it would still be tripped at least for the overload part
|> of the fault. An arc fault breaker generally includes GFCI protection
|> as well as traditional magnetic and thermal overload protection.
|>
|> --
|> |---------------------------------------/----------------------------------?|
|> | Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org) / Do not send to the address below |
|> | first name lower case at ipal.net / [email protected] |
|> |------------------------------------/-------------------------------------?|
|
| I think you're right. From my web reading, it looks like an AFCI
| should be protective against parallel arc faults but not likely to
| trip on a series one, nor anything on an applicance cord, extension
| cord, etc.

Presumably this type of protection is going to be required with no products
yet available, or well field tested, to comply with. Hopefully when they
do get series arc protection devices ready, they won't be fooled by motors,
switching power supplies, and most lightbulb filament failures. There's a
lot of waveform smarts that has to be squeezed into a tiny box that's going
to get awfully hot with so many of them in there (and all those neutral
pigtails clogging up the airflow), and has to last for 20 years or more.
 
J

Jeff Waymouth

Jan 1, 1970
0
Here in the US we call 'em gremlins, but I'm pretty sure they're the
same species.......

Jeff Waymouth
 
C

cupra

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jeff said:
Jeff Waymouth
Palindrome said:
Don Klipstein wrote:
Here in the US we call 'em gremlins, but I'm pretty sure they're the
same species.......

We have gremlins too - the diiference is the pixys and faeries *can* be good
to you if you treat them well!

http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/2249

"Another less common legend, but one which is found elsewhere in England and
Scandinavia alike, is that of a ploughman who was at work in one of the
Sidwell fields. As he worked he heard what he took to be a child crying, and
lamenting that it had "broken its peel," round the barrow. The "peel" is the
long wooden shovel with which the bread is put into the old brick-ovens, but
the man went to see if he could find the child, whom he supposed must have
wandered from home. He could see no one, but on the side of the mound was
the broken peel, which he mended with string, being good natured, and
supposing that the child could not be far away. When he left work in the
evening he went to see if the peel had been recovered. It was gone, but in
its place was a cake hot from the oven of the grateful pixy."
 
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