Most powerful strobe light of the world!

Hello to everybody! I only would like to present you the DIY strobe light for my ultralight aircraft. I know that I’m a little off topic because a strobe is not proper a flashlight but it’s always light, so… hope you like!

I built this strobe because the commercial one are pricey and not so powerful. So I decide to build one myself around the most powerful led of the world! Or, at least, of the Mouser catalogue. Well, honestly it’s only the second one, because in the beginning I didn’t want to spend too much. The most powerful costs double for a 50% more power.

This is the setup, three Luminus CVM32, 200W max each, a boost DCDC converter 12-80V and an Arduino Nano:

This is the “little” capacitor that gives 65J of punch to the LEDs:

This is the complete set up ready to be tested:

This is the comparison with the sun reflected in a mirror, with minimum exposure:

The DCDC converter charge the capacitor to 80V and once every 1,5s Arduino put a MOSFET in conduction for 50ms through a 0,5ohm resistor just to limit a bit the peak current. The actual peak power of each LED is about 400W. I’m very happy of the result, the flash it’s a punch in the eye.
Future improvements: add a second capacitor and buy a second set of LED to put in parallel or buy the most powerful one.

That all, that you! :smiley:

Nice work! Is there a video?

I did a short video just to see the flash pattern. The power is strongly reduced to avoid washing the image and get everything white.

Looks excellent. What are you using for a gate driver?

Nothing. The output of the Arduino directly controls the mosfet.

Interesting. I found some drivers and bulbs for xenon strobes while looking for garden/yard security lights (long, tangential story).

My back of the envelope calculations are as follows:

Aviator LED strobe:

65J/0.05sec = 1300W

1300W*100lm/W = 130,000lm

130,000lm for 0.05 sec = 6500lm/sec.

Xenon strobe data is more tricky, I found a post on CPF estimating a 50j Nikon SB800 strobe produced approximately 1.4 million lumens.

I was looking at a kit to drive a 200j xenon bulb for (guessing) 0.002 seconds(?).

200j/0.002s = 100000w

100000w*30lm/W = 3million lm.

3million lm for 0.002 seconds = 6000lm/sec.

Can anyone confirm/correct the above?

I wanna see the aircraft this goes on