Anti-fungal blue light (ABL) therapies have been widely studied to treat various microbial infections in the literature. The blue light with wavelengths ranging from 400 to 470 nm has been reported to be effective to inhibit various kinds of bacteria and fungi. The existing studies usually report the viability rates of the pathogens under the irradiation of the blue light with different dosage parameters. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is still no work especially focusing on studying the effect of ABL therapies on treating candida vaginitis, where it is important to study the viability of both the Candida albicans (C. albicans) and the human vaginal epithelial cells. It is the purpose of this work to conduct ABL experiments on both of these two cells, analyze the effects, and determine the best ABL wavelength out of three candidates, i.e., 405-nm, 415-nm, and 450-nm wavelength. The viability rates of the C. albicans and the human vaginal epithelial cells irradiated by the three blue LED light sources were measured, whose irradiance (power density) were all set to 50 mW/cm². The dynamic viability models of the C. albicans and the epithelial cells were built based on the experimental data. Moreover, in this work, we also built a functional relationship between the viability of these two types of cells, by which we further compared the effects of the blue light irradiation on both the C. albicans and vaginal epithelial cells. The experimental data showed that when an approximately 80% inhibiting rate of the C. albicans was achieved, the survival rates of the epithelial cells were 0.6700, 0.7748, and 0.6027, respectively for the treatment by the 405-nm, 415-nm, and 450-nm wavelength light. On the other hand, by simulating the functional relationship between the viability of the two types of cells, the survival rates of the epithelial cells became 0.5783, 0.6898, and 0.1918 respectively using the 405-nm, 415-nm and 450-nm wavelength light, when the C. albicans was completely inhibited. Therefore, both the experimental data and the model simulation results have demonstrated that the 415-nm light has a more effective anti-fungal result with less damage to the epithelial cells than the 405-nm and 450-nm light.

In lighting systems consisting light-emitting diodes (LEDs), excessive temperature is a main cause of degraded luminous efficacy, which leads to reduced average illuminance and distorted illumination rendering. Modeling the thermal dynamics of LEDs is hence essential in designing thermal dissipators and controllers for maintaining constant illuminance or chromaticity. In the existing literature, both physical modeling and system identification have been proposed, which all find the dependence of the temperature on the input power. When the power fluctuates, e.g., due to dimming control, the thermal dynamics becomes nonlinear. Moreover, when a photoelectrothermal model is used in the control synthesis, the nonlinearity due to the product of the temperature-dependent efficacy and the input power must be considered. These nonlinearities are either ignored or linearized in most existing methods. The main contribution of this work is treating the aforementioned nonlinearities in a linear parameter varying (LPV) framework. First, the nonlinear thermal dynamics is identified by LPV system identification techniques. Then, a controller to track reference illuminance is designed by H_∞ control techniques to be robust to both the temperature and the disturbance from ambient light. The identification data and the designed controller are collected from and verified on a real experimental setup.