Wildwood Boardwalk Coastal Street Lighting Project.

The real complexity of this project lies in the fact that the client’s needs weren’t a single metric, but rather multiple long-term operational goals coexisting.

First, there’s the reliability pressure from the coastal environment. The salt and moisture in the seaside air continuously adhere to the surface and internal structure of the lighting fixtures. If the LED lighting module materials, protective structures, or heat dissipation design are inadequate, solder joint oxidation, circuit corrosion, and localized failures are very likely to occur later.
Based on our past experience with coastal lighting projects, many outdoor lighting fixtures appear fine for the first two years, but over time, brightness differences begin to appear between different fixtures. These problems aren’t just due to LED chip failure itself, but may also be the result of long-term heat accumulation and environmental corrosion.
Therefore, the client specifically emphasized at the project’s inception:

• They wanted the LED modules to maintain consistent brightness over long-term operation;
• They wanted to reduce the frequency of later maintenance and replacements;
• They required at least a 3-year warranty.

At the same time, the project also needed to consider the lighting atmosphere of the tourist area. Compared to traditional 6000K street lighting, while 3000K warm white light is more visually comfortable, it naturally sacrifices some luminous efficacy. Therefore, the client wanted to achieve a brightness output of 10,000-15,000 lm in warm light environments while keeping the system power consumption below 150W.
This meant the project couldn’t simply rely on increasing power to solve the brightness problem; it was essential to truly improve the luminous efficiency of the lighting modules.

The client’s core objectives were as follows:

Challenges and Technical Difficulties.

The real challenge of this project wasn’t achieving 10,000-15,000 lm brightness, but rather maintaining a stable brightness within that range over a long period in a coastal environment. Many outdoor lighting modules can achieve high brightness initially, but maintaining stable luminous efficiency after several years of continuous operation is the true test of module design capabilities.

At the beginning of the project, our primary focus was on thermal management. Based on the client’s power constraints and brightness requirements, we determined that the entire LED module needed to have very high luminous efficiency. However, high luminous efficiency also easily leads to another problem: concentrated hot spots.
Especially in high-mast streetlights, the fixtures typically need to operate continuously throughout the night, and summer ambient temperatures are already quite high. If the LED arrangement is not optimized, prolonged high-temperature operation in localized areas will significantly accelerate:

• Lumen depreciation.
• Color shift.
• Solder fatigue.

These problems may not be obvious in the short term, but they will gradually become apparent after a few years.

Another challenge came from the salt spray environment of the coast. Many ordinary outdoor modules pass IP testing in the laboratory, but in actual coastal environments, long-term salt spray will continuously erode the solder layers and connection structures. Based on our past project experience, in high salt spray environments, the first thing that often causes problems in LED modules is not the LED chips themselves, but rather oxidation of the PCB solder layer and increased contact resistance.
Therefore, in this project, we placed even greater emphasis on the reliability of materials and protective coatings than in typical road lighting projects.