Energy Focus: Make an LED to Replace Flares on Army Rockets

The U.S. Army now uses rockets with flares that provide infrared light to soldiers wearing night vision goggles on the battlefield.

But apparently the Army thinks light-emitting diodes (LEDs) could beat the flares on performance and reliability — and it’s asking Energy Focus (NSDQ: EFOI) to help research the possibilities.

The Solon, Ohio-based maker of fiber-optic and LED lighting, which has seen some tough times in its commercial, industrial and swimming pool lines of business, said Tuesday it has won a Department of Defense research grant to work on replacing flares with LEDs. 

The plan is to make an LED that provides lots of infrared light but little or no visible light — all the better to provide infrared illumination of enemies on the battlefield while keeping U.S. soldiers under cover of darkness.

There’s also the matter of increased reliablity of a solid-state electronics system over a burning flare, and the elimination of the risk of ground fires from falling flares, Energy Focus said in its Tuesday announcement. The company didn’t disclose the value of the grant.

It isn’t the first for the company. Back in November 2007 it won a $1 million contract to work with DuPont and the University of Delaware to work on using fiber optics to concentrate light on high-efficiency solar cells (see Energy Focus to Use Fiber Optics to Help Boost Solar Efficiency). 

And late last year it won two more grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), one to develop explosion-proof LED fixtures, and another to develop lighting systems that can “reset a military service member’s natural body rhythms to artificially created environments” — in other words, fool a ship-bound sailors body into thinking it is experiencing natural cycles of sunlight and nighttime darnkess.

The latter is likely a follow-up to its 2007 contract with the U.S. Navy to develop LED-lit fiber optic pipes for Navy ships, meant to cut down on time and effort spent changing light bulbs. So far that’s led to a contract to retrofit a hangar deck on one Navy destroyer.

Energy Focus apparent focus on government contracts may be in response to trouble in its other lines of business. On Tuesday it reported a net loss of $14.4 million for 2008, compared to a 2007 loss of $11.3 million, mainly driven by falling sales in its pool lighting business.

As for infrared LEDs, they’re actually the first type of LEDs to receive a patent, back in 1961. The challenges in developing one to replace a rocket flare will likely be those of power demand and durability.