2025 UV-LED Lamps & UV Mercury Lamps

Hello everyone! I’m a star employee at CHROMÉCLAIR, a brand of hema free gel polish brands.Before exploring the differences between UV mercury lamps and UV-LED lamps, let’s first examine the fundamental curing principles that distinguish traditional UV mercury lamps from UV-LED technology. Together, we’ll delve into the world of UV curing.

Traditional Mercury Lamp

Traditional mercury lamps, also known as traditional high-pressure mercury lamps, consist of a quartz arc tube, an outer bulb (typically coated with phosphor), a metal bracket, resistors, and a lamp base. The arc tube serves as the core component, filled with mercury and inert gas. During discharge, the internal mercury vapor pressure reaches 2–15 atmospheres, hence the designation as a high-pressure lamp. It is one of the UV lamps used for ultraviolet curing applications. Due to its high heat generation, air or water cooling is required. Its principle involves two components: the fluorescent bulb envelope and the discharge tube. Mercury vapor from these lamps is hazardous. In the event of leakage or when the lamp is discarded and broken into glass fragments, a certain amount of mercury remains. This residue, termed “mercury slag,” can contaminate soil and water bodies if not properly treated, posing risks to crops, fruits, vegetables, animals, and humans if ingested. During operation, high-pressure mercury lamps convert nearly 60% of input energy into infrared radiation. Tube temperatures can reach 700–800°C, with wall temperatures typically around 500°C. This poses risks including potential VOC emissions, tube rupture, and fire hazards. The heat generated by UV mercury lamps can damage substrates, particularly those intolerant to high temperatures such as plastic films, paper, wood, leather, and electronic components.

UV LED Curing Lamp

UV LED curing lamps differ from traditional mercury lamps. UV-LED, or ultraviolet light-emitting diodes, are a type of LED. The core component of a light-emitting diode consists of a chip formed by P-type and N-type semiconductors, with a transition layer between them called the PN junction. In certain semiconductor materials, when minority carriers injected into the PN junction recombine with majority carriers, excess energy is released in the form of light, directly converting electrical energy into light energy. When a reverse voltage is applied to the PN junction, minority carriers cannot easily inject, so no light is emitted. This means part of the energy is converted into light energy—which is what we need—while the remainder is converted into heat energy, raising the junction temperature and dissipated through heat dissipation. When operating in forward bias (i.e., with a forward voltage applied across its terminals), current flows from the LED’s anode to its cathode. This causes the semiconductor crystal to emit light across the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared. The intensity of this light is proportional to the applied current.

UV LED curing lamps are light-emitting diodes that utilize solid-state semiconductor chips as their light-emitting material. Compared to traditional lamps, UV LED lamps offer advantages such as greater energy efficiency, environmental friendliness, superior color rendering, and faster response times, making them widely developed and applied in the market.

Energy efficiency is the most prominent feature of UV LED lamps.

UV LED technology achieves over 10 times higher effective luminous efficiency compared to mercury lamp systems. Furthermore, mercury lamps must remain continuously powered regardless of whether effective irradiation occurs, resulting in constant electricity consumption. In contrast, UV LED systems consume power only during irradiation, with near-zero power usage during standby. Consider a simple calculation using the energy savings of a single Jingruiming UV LED varnish curing lamp: 270 (watts) × 8 (hours) × 365 (days) = 800 (kWh). This demonstrates that each lamp can save over a thousand yuan annually in electricity costs alone. Moreover, by conserving energy, each lamp indirectly reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 1.4 tons annually—equivalent to the annual exhaust of a passenger car.

Environmental Friendliness: Another Highlight of UV LED Lamps

UV LED lamps contain no heavy metals like mercury, unlike mercury lamps, further highlighting their eco-friendly nature. Additionally, UV LED lamps operate at low voltages ranging from 5V to 32V, with surface temperatures exceeding 5°C. This contrasts sharply with mercury lamps, which require voltages between 200W and 20KW and generate surface temperatures of 700–800°C, while also emitting VOCs. As health and environmental concerns grow, more consumers are opting for eco-friendly UV LED lighting.

Compared to other light sources, are UV LED lamps “cleaner”?

The term “clean” here does not refer to the physical cleanliness of the lamp’s surface or interior. Rather, it signifies that UV LED lamps are cold light sources that generate minimal heat. This prevents them from attracting or accumulating dust particles. Crucially, unlike mercury lamps where high temperatures cause material degradation and subsequent substance buildup, such issues are entirely absent in UV LED technology.

UV LED Lamps Have Longer Lifespans

Compared to traditional UV curing equipment, where mercury lamps last only 800–3000 hours, UV LED curing systems achieve lifespans of 20,000–30,000 hours. UV LED systems can be instantly activated only when UV light is needed. Assuming a duty cycle of DUIY=1/5 (preparation time=5, irradiation time=1), the service life of UV LED systems is equivalent to 30–40 times that of mercury lamp systems. This reduces lamp replacement time, boosts production efficiency, and offers significant energy savings. In contrast, traditional mercury lamp curing equipment must remain constantly illuminated during operation. This is due to the slow lamp startup and the impact of frequent on/off cycles on lamp lifespan, resulting in unnecessary power consumption and shortened lamp operational life.

UV LED have no thermal radiation? Healthier?

It’s true. Medium-to-high power UV LEDs emit no infrared radiation. As a cold light source with zero thermal radiation, UV LEDs cause minimal surface temperature rise on illuminated objects, resolving long-standing thermal damage issues in optical communications and LCD manufacturing. They are particularly suitable for applications requiring minimal temperature rise, such as LCD edge sealing and film printing. Furthermore, UV LED curing lamps generate minimal heat, eliminating the health hazards associated with mercury lamps—including excessive heat, unbearable working conditions, and harmful gases. Crucially, UV LED curing lamps contain no mercury (a common hazardous substance in CCFL technology) and produce no ozone, making them a safer, more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional light sources.

UV LED lamps deliver exceptional irradiance

UV LED lamps utilize high-power LED chips and specialized optical designs to achieve high-precision, high-intensity ultraviolet irradiation. Jingruiming UV light output reaches irradiance levels of 5–30 W/cm². Utilizing cutting-edge optical technology and manufacturing processes, they achieve optimized high-intensity output and uniformity surpassing traditional mercury lamp irradiation methods. Their light intensity is nearly double that of conventional mercury lamps, enabling faster curing of UV adhesives. This significantly reduces production time and substantially boosts manufacturing efficiency. With traditional mercury lamp systems, adding irradiation channels reduces the output energy per channel. In contrast, LED irradiation employs independently controlled emitters, ensuring irradiation energy remains at maximum levels regardless of channel count. Its ultra-concentrated light intensity shortens processing times compared to mercury lamps. Enhanced design flexibility and control capabilities further boost production efficiency.

Wide Applications of UVLED Lamps

Current applications of ultraviolet UVLEDs include: optical sensors and instruments, UV authentication, barcode verification, surface water sterilization, identification and bodily fluid testing/analysis, protein analysis and drug discovery, medical phototherapy, polymer and ink printing, nail gel polish curing, surface disinfection/cosmetic sterilization, and more.

In summary, UV LED light sources possess significant advantages unmatched by high-pressure mercury lamps, making them the preferred curing light source for industrial photopolymerization applications both now and in the future. For over a decade in Shenzhen, Jingruiming has specialized in R&D, production, and sales of UV curing machines, UV curing systems, UV light curing lamps, UV LED curing lamps, UV adhesive curing lamps, screen printing UV curing lamps, gravure printing UV LED curing lamps, rotary UV LED curing lamps, and UV curing lamps. We are both innovators and pioneers in eco-friendly industrial UV LED light curing technology.

We hope this article helps you gain a clearer understanding of UV-LED lamp technology!

CHROMÉCLAIR offers Base coats, Top coats, solid color gel polish without HEMA, and hema free cat eye gel polish.

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