Good to hear from you Alan. Likewise, sorry to have missed you recently in New Zea land.
That 900 lumen flashlight looks like it has promise. Let me know how it works out after you modify and test. I think any of these LED will lend themselves to pressure compensation.
Cliffuse seven of these lights
working off 24 VDC. The lights will work on 10-30 VDC.
For 24 VDC, they pull 1.1
amps. To conduct the test, I built a pressure
chamber out of 4 inch, schedule 40 galvanized pipe fittings. I then made up a
simple electrical penetrator using a ¾
inch pipe fitting, nails and some two-part epoxy. To pressurize the test chamber, I used
my pressure washer with a bypass valve.
To determine when the unit failed, I connected the light through the DC
current section of my multimeter.
Because the line pressure for my house during the test was 74 psig, this is the minimum pressure point for
the test.
Results were that the LED light worked fine for about 4 minutes at 74
psig or 167 fsw. At
that point, the case flooded. The
application I am looking at has a 500 fsw design depth with a max test depth of 625 fsw.
Therefore out of the box these would not work but it would be straight
forward to pull the electronics and LEDS and insert them in a custom 1-atm shell. This lights was $220.
The
reason I thought this had a chance of handling the pressure was because the
case is anodized aluminum and the lens is glass. The LED
face plate was in contact with the lens so structurally it was being
supported. My guess is that they must have used some kind of adhesive to seal the lens rather than an
o-ring. My next step is to tear the fixture apart and see if the
electronics and LED could be repackaged for pressure.
Cliff