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Organic LED Could Replace Light Bulbs?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Apr 15, 2006 06:32 AM
from the heard-that-before dept.
from the heard-that-before dept.
egrinake writes to mention a BBC article about a 'natural' replacement for lightbulbs. From the article: "The organic light-emitting diode (OLED) emits a brilliant white light when attached to an electricity supply. The material, described in the journal Nature, can be printed in wafer thin sheets that could transform walls, ceilings or even furniture into lights. The OLEDs do not heat up like today's light bulbs and so are far more energy efficient and should last longer."
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Good Idea... (Score:5, Funny)
Obvious Safety Application: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Obvious Safety Application: (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obvious Safety Application: (Score:5, Funny)
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In clothes (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I suppose the Tron Guy [tronguy.net] is going to have a field day with this stuff, so it's not all gloom and doom...
Re:In clothes (Score:4, Funny)
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Everyone will steal them for the platinum (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a story of USC and UDC (Universal Display Corp. near Princeton U)
Though it seems they need to make sure it doesn't get wet, and looks like a target for thieves who want the platinum or iridium in every molecule..
Interesting that one article says current incadescents are 15 lumens/watt (true?) while OLED is now at 20 with potentially 60 l/w in near future. I thought those led/dry cell driven pocket torches produced 30 lumens though..
google keys: Professor Mark Thompson of the University of Southern California oled
Re:Everyone will steal them for the platinum (Score:5, Interesting)
as far as I can tell, that is marketing bullshit.
I have a LED headlight for my bicycle and while it is very intense when its pointing right at you, it has very poor illumination capability when compared to an incandescent headlight. The light is very directional so when they say 'X lumens' it generally means they measured the output in the beam segment rather than the the whole sphere.
For town riding, such a headlight is fine. You arent using it for its illumination, you really only want a light so cars can see you, and if you are riding into oncoming traffic at night chances are you are a fool. The rear light is generally more important. In the country where streetlighting is non existent, the LED is barely adequate and you need an incandescent bulb.
I can't be bothered to google for references to back my shaky claims up, its just a personal anecdote.
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Finally, a use for IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm, interesting possibilities...
Re:Finally, a use for IPv6 (Score:5, Funny)
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economy (Score:4, Informative)
And... do not compare it to traditional light bulbs. Traditional light bulbs are dead.
Of course, LEDs have achieved a lot in producing more and more light, but currently it is some 10s or 100s fold differends between the price of the
fluorescent light sources and a LED based one, and the fluorescent light source (mostly) produces more light than the LED.
Yes, I hope that OLEDs will be the ones who can reach the barrier, but until that this article is very-very optimistic
check
(figure:)
http://europa.eu.int/comm/energy_transport/atlas/
articles:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/energy_transport/atlas/
http://www.lumileds.com/pdfs/TP40_IESNA_July%2020
100% efficient (Score:4, Insightful)
This article is crap. (Score:4, Interesting)
#1, they're too expensive. Compact fluorescents - which are are a 4x efficiency gain over incandescents - are only just starting to catch on now that they're under $2.
#2, the color rendering sucks. You know how old fluorescents used to made you look undead? LED's suck even more.
So, instead of addressing either of those hard issues, they give us an article full of: "The researchers believe that eventually", "Before this becomes a reality", "If that barrier can be overcome", etc. Thanks for the fluff.
Also, I'm not normally a grammar nazi, but for the love of god, 23 sentences:21 paragraphs is a ratio to be ashamed of.
Re:This article is crap. (Score:5, Informative)
Your 4th point is simply wrong. The sun emits light as a dark body, and it is a very hot dark body. It is hard to emulate the sun light with LEDs because LEDs have a very narrow emission spectrum, and a dark body's emission is continuos. Also, because the sun is very hot, it emmits light at very hight frequencies (blue and violet), that are hard to abtain on LEDs.
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Don't Get It Wet (Score:5, Funny)
If only they could put it into an airtight package, something small and convenient, maybe a
Yeah but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:stupid energy noob question (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an extra layer of inefficiency. If you heat your house by burning gas, you get nearly perfect efficiency: almost every joule of heat liberated by the chemical reaction goes into your house, with a relatively small amount of waste heat going up the chimney; modern boilers are very efficient indeed at getting every bit of heat they can.
If, OTOH, you heat your house by electric current - i.e. by the waste heat from your electrical devices - then somewhere in the world there's a power plant burning gas on your behalf. That plant converts gas to heat at higher efficiency than your boiler, but then wastes energy in the conversion to electricity, and then even more is lost in transmission to your home.
So, if you switch to more economical lighting, your boiler will have to burn a little extra gas because you're no longer getting the heating effect of old-fashioned incandescent lightbulbs. But that's more than offset at the power plant, where they have to burn less gas because you're consuming less electricity.
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Re:stupid energy noob question (Score:5, Insightful)
The above statement assumes that you live in a place where heating is the main problem for indoor environmental control. I'd like to point out that for folks between the Tropics of Cancer & Capricorn or respectively just above, or below them heating is not the problem, cooling is.
Here in East Texas we're already running our air conditioners and it's only April. The reason for this is not that it's all that hot, but to dehumidify the air in our homes, offices, etc.. I've lived in Texas for all my 40 plus years. Normally we have more than ten days of 100 degree F. or greater being our daily high temperature. Late July, and all of August, plus the first half of September can produce some real scorchers. The use of high efficiency lighting, helps reduce the power consumption at home, office, etc. in two ways. First, it simply use less Joules to produce a given amount of lumens of light, second it reduces the amount of waste heat that the AC must deal with. So, you save on the cost per lumen of light, and you save on the cost of AC that is used to rid the indoor environment of the wast heat.
I've noticed that many of the post here on slashdot have a 'high latitude/left coast' bias on energy issues. Can't imagine why.
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Re:Quick, bury it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because if they could do this, they'd have already done it for fluorescent tubes, which can be up to about 60% efficient (compared to 10% for incandescent bulbs)?
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Re:Quick, bury it! (Score:5, Insightful)
IF all of those things are true, then let a bunch of lightbulb manufacturers conspire not to produce it! All it takes is one who's willing to produce it, who can then start reeping huge market share (to meet the assumed customer demand). Heck, it could be you. If all of the above things are true, then you could come in and make a killing on this thing even if every single lightbulb manufacturer chooses not to. And as soon as you do, every manufacturer who "conspired" not to produce this will be forced to in order to chase after those profits that you're getting.
If any one of those assumptions above is false, then it does not require a conspiracy to prevent widespread production of this product. The most likely assumption that's false is #4, but it could be any of them. In any case, if we don't see OLEDs dominating the lighting market, will you simply conclude that it was a secret conspiracy or that maybe one of your upfront assumptions was false? My recommendation would be to apply occam's razor.
$.02
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Re:Quick, bury it! (Score:5, Informative)
It's much more down to earth: there's a simple relationship between light yield and lifetime (from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
- Light output is approximately proportional to V^3.4
- Power consumption is approximately proportional to V^1.6
- Lifetime is approximately inversely proportional to V^16
More light for your watt means the bulb burns out more quickly. They are now tuned for 1000 hours, which -mind you- means about $10 in electricity during the lifetime. If you want to increase the lifetime, put it on a dimmer.Parent
Re:Quick, bury it! (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously we're worried somebody else will take away our lighting market share by bringing out the killer-led-app. However, there's no question of "buying up IP and sitting on it". This playing field is as open as it gets in the industry.
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Actually what I see happening is (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Putting out all sorts of products using OLEDs, expanding beyond what we conceive of light being used for
2. Putting out specialty incadescents/flourescents that fill the gaps in the first
If anything this expands their market and an innovative company will take off. Not all lighted items need to provide illumination that is bright enough to read by. A lot can be done with highlights, accenting areas with different shades and such. Accent lighting will be a big, replacing LEDs that are currently trying to edge into that market. All the business uses will help as well. It would be far much easier to use these for instore billboards than the flourescent lit displays so common today.
Now another area is backgrounds. Better for business use than home, though some may use it in homes. Can't imagine my home looking like 1999's moonbase but I can see walls in certain types of businesses where the whole area is covered and changed in color for events and such.
Lighting products are not all about letting you see things, some exist to be seen
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Re:Quick, bury it! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:People like sunlight (Score:5, Insightful)
theres also many types of fluorescent bulbs. the film industry uses daylight balanced fluorescent quite a bit now because you can have a continuous light source without all the extra heat generated by the incadescents.
in any case, regardless of what the color spectrum is, it is easy to color filter a brilliant white light.
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