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foot-lambert

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Also known as footlambert

A foot-lambert or footlambert (fL, sometimes fl or ft-L) is a unit of luminance in United States customary units and some other unit systems. A foot-lambert equals 1/ or 0.3183 candela per square foot, or 3.426 candela per square meter (the corresponding SI unit). The foot-lambert is named after Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777), a Swiss-German mathematician, physicist and astronomer. It is rarely used by electrical and lighting engineers, who prefer the candela per square foot or candela per square meter units.

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Wikidata SPARQL query equivalent
wd:Q5465726 p:P2370/psn:P2370 [wikibase:quantityAmount ?source; wikibase:quantityUnit ?base]. ?item p:P2370/psn:P2370 [wikibase:quantityAmount ?target; wikibase:quantityUnit ?base]. BIND(?source / ?target as ?value)
unit symbol
fL
conversion to SI unit
3.4262590996353905269167459616502185942345836205242895980081457842261522902636239909934874631928747639705405275598722719276552
measured physical quantity
luminance
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A foot-lambert or footlambert (fL, sometimes fl or ft-L) is a unit of luminance in United States customary units and some other unit systems. A foot-lambert equals 1/ or 0.3183 candela per square foot, or 3.426 candela per square meter (the corresponding SI unit). The foot-lambert is named after Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777), a Swiss-German mathematician, physicist and astronomer. It is rarely used by electrical and lighting engineers, who prefer the candela per square foot or candela per square meter units.

The luminance of a perfect Lambertian diffuse reflecting surface in foot-lamberts is equal to the incident illuminance in foot-candles. For real diffuse reflectors, the ratio of luminance to illuminance in these units is roughly equal to the reflectance of the surface. Mathematically, L_\mathrm v = E_\mathrm v \times R, where L_\mathrm v is the luminance, in foot-lamberts; E_\mathrm v is the illuminance, in foot-candles; and R is the reflectivity, expressed as a fractional number (for example, a grey card with 18% reflectivity would have

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “foot-lambert” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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