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Science Technology

OLEDs May Generate Electricity 43

Posted by timothy from the another-step-toward-off-grid-computing dept.
NewmansDaddy writes: "According to a PCMag article, 'When the OLEDs are working as a display, you apply electricity to the materials and they emit light. It turns out, however, that if you apply light to these devices, you can get them to produce electricity; in other words, they will run backward...'"
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OLEDs May Generate Electricity More

OLEDs May Generate Electricity

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  • Renewable lighting? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by darylp ( 41915 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @08:27AM (#3900923)
    How well do these work when compared to traditional Solar Cell based components? With the addition of a few capacitors, it would be nice to have OLED lighting which would recharge during the day.

  • finally (Score:3, Funny)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @08:27AM (#3900926) Homepage Journal
    The solar-powered flashlight is finally a reality.

  • So??? (Score:4, Informative)

    by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @08:35AM (#3900981) Homepage Journal
    LEDs are also photoelectric. I built a sensor with two of them, one as a photodiode. I did this 8 years ago, for fun while visiting my friend in Florida.

    --Mike--

    • Though the author quoted the "two-way operation" part of the article, the important thing here is not so much the two-way operation of organic LEDs, but that we have a different technology which serves a similar function.

      The organic LED is to the LED what the solid state transistor was to the vacuum tube. The technologies are different, but the function is the same. I'm not claiming that the OLED will completely replace the semiconductor LED, but it does have potential in several areas.

  • OLED's have signifigantly shorter lifespans (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @08:44AM (#3901060) Homepage Journal
    LED's have supposedly 100,000 hours of use in them. of course, that's at about half intensity, and they still dim over time, and it's not been fully proved (LED's haven't been mainstream for 10 years really)....

    OLED's supposedly have somthing like a maximum of 30,000 hours of life.... would using them as primitive "solar cells" decrease their lifespan considerably? or is this a possible reason as to why they have such a short lifespan?

    on a somewhat completely unrelated topic, if increasing battery life is so damn important, why haven't they started including $3 radio shack 3v solar panels on everything in existance? or does the voltage/amperage have to be >= standard voltage of the battery? we have a 200mA trickle charger for our 12v deep cycle boat battery...

    would i be able to run/charge my m100 off a $3 3v solar cell? if i underclocked it? yes, i realize it's usually in my pocket....but it does sit underneath a hallogen light when i'm @ the computer...
    • Lifetime is longer for solar cells as the electric fields are lower.

      I doubt that a $3 solar cell would provide enough current to run a palmtop. Find the wattage requirements, solar cells are approx £10 per watt.
    • Re: Solar cells on portable electronics.

      They are starting to do this - an acquantaince of mine has a cell-phone with a small solar panel, which is indeed a trickle charger for the phone's battery. You can still charge it in a standard charger, but it does prolong the life of the battery. Apparently, these things are all the rage in California.

      I'm not sure where he got his from, but I've seen them for sale at www.snpower.com. Only cell-phones, and I have no experience dealing with that particular company. -matt

    • LED's haven't been mainstream for 10 years really

      What?!? I was buying LEDs from Radio Shack about 20 years ago, when I was discovering "neat stuff" - I think a pack of 15 or 20 assorted LEDs was around $2.25 back then... (I'm sure my dad knew better than to ask why a 10 year old was wasting his allowance on stuff like that, because he probably bought vacuum tubes as a kid)
  • So not only will we get better displays for out PDAs and laptops, but then they can be charged a bit while off.
  • Now it becomes really easy to implement some sort of light pen device. Also, how about a screen/scanner combination?

  • Ah, photonics (Score:5, Informative)

    by Yarn ( 75 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @08:59AM (#3901178) Homepage
    A friend of mine has been working on organic solar cells for the last 4 months (MSc Project), he's hoping to reach 4% efficiency. Last time I spoke to him he was just about to put the ITO transparent contacts on, then test it with different wavelengths of light.

    The possibilities of making organic solar cells have been considered almost as long as organic LEDs have been known (one of my professors was in the Cambridge group who discovered the effect) but the efficiency will probably never be near that of good polycrystaline silica.

    To power my laptop I'd need half a metre square of high grade solar cell, about £500...

  • not both (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bearbones ( 532127 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @09:06AM (#3901222)
    Read the article

    It says that to generate electricity it needs to be formulated differently.

    So you get a display or a solar cell, not both.

    But, maybe they can work on an new proccess that does both.
  • If I recall correctly, commercial solar cells are about 15% efficient -- that is, if you focus 100 Watts of white light on them, you get at most 15 Watts of electrical power out.

    It was Big News [sciam.com] earlier this year when an organic solar cell broke the 2% efficiency barrier (though it's still below 2% for sunlight.) And that's with a material specifically engineered to be an efficient solar cell.

    This stuff, optimized to shine light rather than absorb it, is probably considerably less efficient. Maybe by an order of magnitude even. Combine that with the impracticality of charging your laptop even with commercial solar cells, and you've got a non-starter. Perhaps after several more generations of research this will have some use, but not now.

    • nope (Score:2, Insightful)

      by bcboy ( 4794 )
      Efficiency is only part of the issue. The other is expense and difficulty of manufacturing. If it's less efficient but cheaper, it's still viable.

      • Re:nope (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Peter T Ermit ( 577444 )
        Even with 15% efficiency solar cells, you probably wouldn't be able to power a laptop or extend its battery life appreciably. The point I was trying to make was that even if this stuff were cheap, and did last, and were easy to bond with computer cases (none of which is obvious), it would still be useless because of this.

  • Remind anyone else of... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Zarquon ( 1778 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @10:04AM (#3901638)
    Douglas-Martin sunscreen's from Heinlein's stories?
    IIRC, their functionality was based upon the firefly's light reaction.
    • Dident the two finally had to give it away since "others" were trying to destroy it. Also someting about 98% efficeny?
      • They said 'Give it away' but they meant 'License it for a small royalty'.. $.02/sq. ft. or some such. But it did go from Trade Secret to Cheap Patent because of the Mob and Moneyed Interests. And there was the obligatory reference to secret, high-milage car. Good short, have to dig it up again. But yeah.. it was high, once they removed the visible light filters. And 'made from common clay' or something.

  • Fun with LEDs, not just OLEDs (Score:3, Informative)

    by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @10:10AM (#3901684) Homepage
    Take a yellow or green LED and shine your handy-dandy green laser pointer ($150 @ thinkgeek, support your sponsors!) directly into the lens. You get a little over 1VDC output from the LED, but only a few milliamps of current.
    I learned this trick from this page [att.net] at the LED Museum [att.net]. Theres a picture of this stunt [att.net] there as well.

    This story seems newsworthy because it's nifty new OLED properties, but it's not really news that you can get an LED to rectify some electrons out of a light source.

  • Bah humbug (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BoBaBrain ( 215786 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @10:17AM (#3901743)
    In the same way that a speaker will work as a microphone?

    Just because it's possible doesn't make it a good idea or even news...

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday July 17, 2002 @10:19AM (#3901760)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Question... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bmh5c ( 587520 )
    Does anybody know how expensive OLEDs are? If they can be sprayed on using inkjet printing procedures, could I just paint my whole house (or at least my roof) with them? Probably wouldn't power much, but it couldn't hurt...

  • LED's will too, it's just a Diode. Just like Solar Cells. They are made differently though cuz the solar cell needs to have a large surface area to be efficient, the [O]LED is designed as an emitter, it doesn't. (They also use different materials for different bandgaps & hence color.)

  • Organic Solar Cells (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OLEDS and Organic Photovoltaics are obviously based on similar designs, but there are optimized differently. This is clear since OLEDS are meant to emit one wavelength only, where the ideal solar cell absorbs as many wavelengths as possible. The highest solar efficiency reached with organic solar cells are 3 and 4.5 for polymer based and organic crystal based, respectively. In the end, the overall efficiency is NOT the point... although the best single crystal inorganic solar cells have efficiencies of over 20% (yes, check... GaAs thin films, used in space), they are extremely expensive. What makes Organic solar cells attractive are the fact that they don't need elaborate fabrication (theoretically), and thus will cost more than 4 times less... so for large scale applications one can just install more than 4X the solar cells for less money. Obviously this doesn't help those who want to power their laptops out in the middle of the desert, but when it comes to scaled economic viability, they are still relevent. Hence why so many people are working on them.
  • you can also use your kitchen sink as a toilet... This is basic electronics, perhaps an article should be run that the earth really isnt flat...Boring Why is the quality reporting going down the 'kitchen sink'?
  • This could be very useful for creating optically isolated bi-directional interfaces. Right now, when designing a circuit you would use one optoisolator per signal and it would be one direction only.
    This also could be really cool for fiber optics. Instead of having to run one fiber for tx and one for rx you could just run one fiber and switch the led between a tranmitter and a reciever. Do OLED laser diodes exist?

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