The poles before the lights!
16m tall high-masts at Valmont Structures India Pvt. Ltd., Indapur
In the world of energy, irrigation and traffic infrastructure, Valmont Industries Inc. needs no introduction. This large, publicly held American company is world-leading in utility infrastructure equipment in these sectors. At their massive Indian factory in Indapur (Maharashtra), they have a state-of-the-art yard showcasing their utility pole products. For years, they had been observing Aagami’s beautiful, reliable and high-performance street-light fixtures all over Magarpatta City, where Valmont’s India headquarters are located. So when it was time to look for beautiful LED fixtures that best showcased their high-mast poles, they rang us up.
Valmont’s requirements were very unorthodox to say the least, given their objective. Not only did they need a very high and uniform illumination in a 50m diameter around the pole, but they also needed a very sharp cut-off in light beyond that. This was to ensure that light from adjacent poles does not pollute each other’s circle of illumination. And obviously, the fixtures had to be beautiful to match Valmont’s beautiful hightech poles! To meet these requirements, we designed a special fixture with a unique shape, which was engineered to give a precise 50m diameter circle of illumination. Moreover, when six of these fixtures were mounted on the pole, it created a continuous ‘inverted umbrella’ shape, enhancing the beauty of the smooth, high-tech Valmont pole finish. And all this, within 310W per fixture, easily exceeding the light output of nearby 800W of
MH or HPSV lights with a much tighter photometry. More importantly, this was done with 2012-era LED technology, which has improved by orders of magnitude today! Another shocker for Valmont? Each of the fixtures weighed only 11Kg! With such light-weight fixtures, the brilliant engineers at Valmont immediately started wondering how they could further optimise their poles and lantern carriages if such ultra.