Next up on my to-do list concerning this project is to cover the walls with black-white construction plastic. The white side reflects 10% less than mylar, but it is also much less expensive.
None of the Chinese arrays had a manufacturer's name... even on what was passed off as data sheets.
As far as the cost of the Bridgelux arrays... you get what you pay for. Even if the other ones were free, I'd still use the Bridgelux stuff. $75 is dirt cheap for what you get. You don't want to know what the custom CNC machined heat sinks cost... (in fact, I don't know... I wasn't paying for them).
Also, the light output of the Chinese arrays dropped of quite a bit after not that many hours of usage. They were properly driven and under active, accurate thermal/power control.
As far as LED house lighting see my experiences at: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/7803 My house is now totally LED driven... well over 300 LED bulbs, including some custom built fixtures with smaller Bridgelux arrays.
180 000 lumens… Are you lighting up a stadium or what? 
[/quote]
180 000 lumens.. Are you lighting up a stadium or what? :P
[/quote]
The exact application is uhh, well, uhhh, kinda sorta classified (OK, I promised the Patrons of the Beast to not divulge its intended use). We don't want the Men In Black coming around with their flashy things taking away birthdays, now do we? (hey, if they do, my flashy thing is brighter than theirs)
I can say that the design is SWEEEEET (if I do say so myself). Unicorns quiver in its glorious presence (or maybe that's just what unicorns with fried retinas do). I wee-wee down my leg every time I see it in action. So does my seeing eye dog.
It is highly fault tolerant, fail soft, power system is dual redundant, anything and everything (and then some) that can be monitored, reported, and compensated for is. Nothing can go wrong, failure is not an option, would you like fries with that.
And it is technically a flashlight. 40 pounds of 16S 2P 20Ah A123 LiFePO4 batteries can run it for around an hour at full blast. Can run for months at min output. Even on low the thing is scary.
BTW, most stadium lights use banks of 1000 watt, 100,000 lumen metal halide lamps. LEDs are just getting to that level of efficiency (but let's see you dim one, turn it on instantly, or bounce it around the ocean/countryside, or run it for 50,000+ hours)
Wow, that sounds like amazing design, especially the fault tolerance part - I guess it is used by serious people if it has so many failover’s and redundancy. By the way, got some beamshots? 
Actually the stadiums and golf courses (at least for the most of them here) use 2kW to 8kW ones. Maybe the smaller ones? I know for road works they are already using 2 or 3 units of 1kW for say a digging site of maybe 10 metres and 1 lane wide. The security gate (2 lanes) here uses a 400W LPS, that's quite bright coz it's approaching 200lm/W I think.
It sounds like a lot but it's not, but yeah it's bright though.
Some fun with bike lights!
There is a XM-L bike light here as comparison. The XM-L nearly vanished. hehe
I don't have any shareable pics of the final unit. There are some pics of a previous build of a 5000 lumen prototype here: #291
The beam is extraordinarily even and clean. Absolutely no hot spot. The later modules use a regulated current driver instead of the direct drive. Each LED has its own independent driver/thermal manager. They are all networked together.
There's talk of doing 500,000 lumens... I saw some specs for a 60 inch carbon arc searchlight that says it does 300,000 lumens (seems a bit low) with 15KW.
Well, carbon arcs do operate in the 20+ lumens per watt region.
Another nice video!
I got my stadium light numbers from the guy that maintains the local high school and college stadiums lights (high school football can be more rabid than pro football here). They typically use 4-8 towers with 24-32 lights on each tower. I had though that they used the bigger bulbs.
A few years ago a lot of schools had problems with their light towers falling down. Turns out that they were all made by the same company and they had corrosion problems at the base. That company went out of business rather fast.
As an optician I cry a little when I see the torture that lens goes through. And I’ve lit trees on fire a lot quicker than that cardboard. To put it into perspective… Think about harnessing the power of the sun across 48 inches and focusing it down to a point approximatly .25”… it litterally says POOF and flames erupt!