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Organic LED Could Replace Light Bulbs?
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."
...but a wafer thin sheet of organic material shining above a cartoon character's head is never going to look as good...!
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
Organic LEDs "are far more energy efficient and should last longer".
What's the bet a few light globe manufacturers will get together, buy the rights and then put it away in the archives?
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
It took me a while to get that image, but then the lights came on!
Without that photo I wouldn't understand the metaphor "the clock is ticking"
Drop a couple AAs into a pouch in a jacket or something, wire it up to strips of this: Suddenly drivers etc. can see you at night. I wonder if there's any feasible way to do this in a torch format....
The problem with your idea is that it makes sense.
I was debating repainting the bedroom, but no, this is much better.
And you thought a ceiling MIRROR was arrogant...
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
Well, I suppose the Tron Guy is going to have a field day with this stuff, so it's not all gloom and doom...
A-Bomb
Thank google for google..
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
What's so wrong about light bulbs or processors producing heat besides their natural purpose ?
It seems to me the more heat I produce from my bulb/processor, the less my temperature regulator will pull energy from my heating system (based on gas, which is becoming more expensive). What's wrong with this way of thinking ?
I have 10,000 light sources in my house... and I want to customize lighting scenes for every mood. Each OLED has its own IPv6 address, and I have a touch screen where I can paint different color lights.
Hmm, interesting possibilities...
Its already unberable. Perhaps we can create our own anti-ad campaign with them. "This space NOT for rent" sort of stuff.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There's only one question every time. How much light/W does it produce (lm/W)? And what is the price for the 'OLED bulb'.
:)
h tmlu/lightdintro2.htmlh tmlu/lightdintro.html0 4_LED_Paper.pdf
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
TFA speculates that these oleds could become 100% efficient. Maybe these people should go to work on the perpetual motion machine. I'd bet the farm that they can't achieve 100%. "In this family we obey the laws of thermodynamics." etc. etc.
OLED's are nice for displays, but not enough lumen/watt efficiency for general illumination.w Article.jhtml?articleID=181503227/
LED's are improving much faster - 100Lm/W from Nichia to hit market soon:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/technology/sho
Everything they're saying about OLEDs, people have said about regular LEDs for some time. Sure, they're efficient and cool, but they've never become a primary lighting source for a couple important reasons:
#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.
Fuck off, I'm full!
You are right. Heating is the one thing that can be done at 100% efficiency. On the other hand I think it is a huge waste to use any energy specifically dedicated to heating.
If you use other devices, such as computers, light bulbs, etc, for heating, you convert them all to work at the efficiency of the powerplant+transmission - which is the best one can do - for electrically powered devices. (and 100% if you generate your electricity at home). Why are some people heating their home, while others run computers in centers, and then have to use airconditioners to cool down the server rooms? Just put computers in people's homes, and give them free heating!
But for a consumer, all that matters is the cost of energy: if 1W from electricity costs the same as 1W from gas, and you heat your house (i.e. outside temp is lower than temperature thermostat is set to), then all your electical devices are magically converted to run at 100% efficiency.
(if the cost of 1W of gas is 1/2 that of 1W electricity, then the conversion is easy - a 70% effcient device runs at 70+30*1/2=85% efficiency)
"Before this becomes a reality, the scientists need to work out a way to seal the OLEDs from moisture which can contaminate the sensitive material, causing it to no longer work."
...bulb... of some kind.
If only they could put it into an airtight package, something small and convenient, maybe a
I'm also worried about this, based on this sentence from TFA:
I've had a closer look at some fluorescents and they have something like 7 or 8 different dyes. You can look at the spectrum by reflection from a CD, for example. There's a clear difference between the continuous spectrum of incandescent bulbs and the discrete one of fluorescents. This three-component LED sounds even worse; on the other hand, the component spectra might be relatively wide.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Imagine the Christmas Light competitions with those suckers
I know OLED displays are currently in research stage, but why isn't anyone making displays out of normal LEDs? LEDs being semiconductor components like transistors, shouldn't it be easy enough to miniaturize them to be small enough to be pixels? Or don't they emit enough light at such small sizes? Why do you need them to be organic to be suitable for displays?
Replace the light switch with a dimmer and your bulb will last MUCH longer, even if you always use it to max. That's because the kick the filament receives when turned on is aliviated. Even if you turn it to maximum very fast, it's still a lot slower then the switch. I used to buy replacement bulbs every now and then. Since I put dimmers all around the house, and that was five years ago, just two bulbs died.
factor 966971: 966971
the same manufactures doing a couple of things.
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
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Sounds like Dave Bowman's bedroom in the last few minutes of 2001. (Too bad we can't post pictures here... thanks again "goatse.cx" commies for ruining things.)
I suggest you read Slashdot
Is there such a thing as 100% efficiency in any physical system in existence? Not that I know of. Sure they could get really close to 100% and that would be nice, but it wouldn't be 100%.
... and these are going to be very expensive lightbuibs.
Now I realize costs of manufacturing in places like China will be much lower in the US, but the hole transport material we used had expensive catalyst requirements which wouldn't scale up over 10kgs. I think I solved that problem before getting laid off (thanks guys) but when all is said and done, this stuff sold for $20-$200 / gram. The dopants, which make the colours, sold for 10x that amount and were even MORE difficult to make (small scale chem lab and uniquely tailored equipment).
Biggest issue in the states? Environmental laws.
Anyways, a single water molecule would destroy an OLED device evntually. I have little hope for that ever being fixed.
Expensive lightbulbs... huh. Who'd figure.
And I really think this is too hard on them re the qualifiers. "Eventually" they think they can hit 100% efficiency. And both the other qualifiers are on the last remaining problem: protection from water.
As for cost, I can think of a few reasons the cost on LED screens might drop faster than the discrete kind.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Hahahahahahahahaha - wafer thin...
Kaboom!
how many OLEDs does it take to replace a lightbulb.
Q: How many marketing guys does it take to change a wafer-thin sheet of organic material coating your home's wall?
A: However many it takes to convince you that *this* is easier than just changing an ordinary incandescent bulb.
seriously though, i can't wait. i want my whole house to light up.
Sorry.. I'll go back to my work now..
Damnit, now I am going to be blinded even more at the lan parties I go to.
I've had a closer look at some fluorescents and they have something like 7 or 8 different dyes. You can look at the spectrum by reflection from a CD, for example. There's a clear difference between the continuous spectrum of incandescent bulbs and the discrete one of fluorescents.
For one thing the latter is throwing off quite a bit of light energy you are never going to see.
This three-component LED sounds even worse; on the other hand, the component spectra might be relatively wide.
You do realise that the device you used to write this on uses "component spectra". Also that the human eye works in just this way...
Somone said similar about the transistor, so I am trying to repeat history, hoping I'll be proved wrong. I can remember all those years ago when we were promised laser home lighting, brighter than the mid-day sun, consuming very little power and everlasting. Obviously not an attractive business model when stacked against the under-rated fuses that pass for light bulbs. Here's hoping some startup can gain the finance to bring OLED lights to market in a big way.
OLEDs are not going to replace light bulbs anytime soon. According to this article OLEDs are putting out about 25 lumens per watt of energy input. Compact fluorescent bulbs currently put out about 40 - 50 lumens per watt, and HID lighting (e.g., mercury vapor and metal halide) put out from 70 - 150 lumens per watt. So, if New Scientist is correct, HID lighting is up to 600% MORE efficient than OLED. The thing that makes OLED interesting is that it can be applied to any surface, but they are not more efficient than light sources we already have.
How many (insert name here) does it take to change an organic light-emitting diode?
Over to you for the punchline...
Old time lightbulbs might be expensive to use but they have a bunch of advantages compared to todays energy efficient bulbs. First of all the energy efficient bulbs and fluorescent lights, emits fever colors of light and it gets harder to see colors under their light. Second, they have a fast flicker that you do not see directly but that the brain can detect. Studies have shown that this light raises your stress level(both because of the color and flickering) and are really bad in an enviroment where you have to concentrate.
Since it is LEDs, it should be possible to make them flickerless. But I don't know about frequency of the light waves from LCDs. If they could use LEDs in different colors, it might be possible to limit the problem with not seeing the right colors.
Light-up outerwear is already easy and cheap. You can power 10 feet of EL wire with two AA batteries and a tiny portable inverter. That's more than enough to light up a jacket.
They're waffer thin.
Usually with #4 it is because it is patented that inventions don't see the light of day, because the conspirators buy the patent or intimidate the patent owner into inaction, or the patent owner is frozen out of the market, or the patent owner is a little bit paranoid, etc. Then when the patent expires, people go, "If the patent was any good, the product would have been successful. Yet another flaw of the current patent system.
The OLEDs do not heat up like today's light bulbs and so are far more energy efficient and should last longer.
Yes, but does it create a nice black-body spectrum curve like conventional light bulbs?
Most people like warm cross-spectrum light because it resembles sunlight, I didn't RTA but 'a brilliant white light' sounds like fluorescent to me. Not a very 'natural' alternative.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
The article says that these lights should last significantly longer than traditional light bulbs. That language implies it doesn't last indefinitely, but how long does it last? Is it a huge task to replace the light? I mean--if the whole ceiling is a light... I mean, it just better last a really long time, if it's tough to replace.
Once they figure out how to produce this stuff cheaply, the bacteria will get hold of it and the whole planet will become brilliant.
Then we'll have to invent artificial darkness to get away from the everpresent glow.
The sensitivity of the eye to R, G, or B is relatively wide-spectrum compared to LEDs. which are nearly monochromatic. For display purposes, tight spectra work well, but when used for lighting of objects which have narrow reflecivity spectra which do not match the spectra of the lights, the colors appear distorted, often severely. For example, an oil slick which appears as a continuous rainbow in sunlight will appear as a series of RGB bands under an RGB LED light. A more common case is poor color accuracy of items dyed with highly saturated non-primary color dyes: if a dye only reflects magenta, for instance, but not blue or red, it will appear grey under RGB light. (I'm glossing over complications with how different kinds of coloring agents and methods actually work which don't relly affect the essential concept.)
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Wafer-thin oled sheets are PEOPLE!!!
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
addition to sig:
Auditor: You've bought a thumbdrive that is twice as big as what you need...
Okay, I'm just a cynical old coot with an "otaku" streak, but I'll believe this when I see OLED stands around the Akihabara train station. If Akihabara is still there by then...
OLEDs ARE MADE OF PEOPLE
The same is true for almost everything that I think organic semiconductors will be used in the future. Take solar cells for example. A silicon solar cell will propably have a much better efficency then organic for quite some time. But that won't matter once the organic cells are down to a fraction of the price per square meter.
You don't have to wait for OLED to be widely available. You can experiment with them now: http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/nanolab/oLED/index.htm l
-CF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon
The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy increases. These oleds generate electromagnetic energy at certain wavelengths only. So, it creates something that has order. ie. there are lots of longer wavelengths that our light can degrade to. Increasing order always costs energy.
I can think of no system that converts energy from one form to another with 100% efficiency. There is always a loss.
"... emits a brilliant white light when attached to an electricity supply."
Holly hell, noone has done THAT before!
what do you feed them?
_______
DIY Linux virus removal:
1) [root@localhost ~]# rm -rf /
I'll be damned if I'm going to replace my office ceiling every few months.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It is good that we are all switching to fluorescent bulbs and away from incandescent bulbs, but, remember, each fluorescent bulb contains a couple of drops of toxic mercury so as to make the bulb be able to light up.
With all the bulbs made over the last 80 years, that adds up to a lot of mercury in the environment (not to mention, a lot of mercury in dumpsters and garbage cans, in your home (from broken bulbs) etc).
Mercury is a carcinogen and is very toxic to the brain (it will make you go mad and can kill you).
So it is important that we rapidly switch form fluorescents to oleds in the next decades, as, oleds are more efficient that fluorescents.
Fluorescent bulbs that fit your regular lamps and such are kind of expensive, around $3-5 each for the ones that give off as much light as the old incandescent 100w bulbs. And about $2-3 for ones equale to 60w bulbs. Although you end up saving money later on your electricity bill and from buying new bulbs to make up for them.
I've already started replacing a lot of my old bulbs with the fluorescent spirally ones in the house. They don't give off as much heat either. I've seen regular LED lightbulbs for sale for regular fixtures but they are around $30+ each and I'm not even sure they have the same lumens a 100w bulb has.
Modern displays (excluding most projectors) use spatial color mixing to make different colors. Take a magnifying glass to a CRT monitor, a TV, or an LCD monitor; you will notice that every color is made by displaying red, green, and blue dots with varying levels of brightness closely next to each other. Once you step back far enough, it looks like each color is represented by a single dot on the display, but this is not actually the case.
if think you have a point here - it's the rapid expansion via heat that causes the light to burn out when you first turn it on; i see that behavior myself, as i'm sure most people do. If you use a dimmer (pulsing the current as it may be) the gradient of heat-increase will STILL be more gradual that way then to full ON/OFF duty cycling that the grandparent post was speaking of.
That is, if you average the duty-cycles, you get X amount of heating in X amount of time. A light switch would average higher then the dimmer on turn-on; you may have something.
james.
What kind of crazy geek would want that?
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
I have found that I particularly like certain varities of flourescent bulb over any other type of light source. I like those in the range of 5800-6300K best. There is a certain comfort when the light has a certain characteristic spectrum (and not one mimicing daylight, but more like "overcast sky").
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The organic light-emitting diode (OLED) emits a brilliant white light when attached to an electricity supply. The material could transform walls, ceilings or even furniture into lights.
Yes, I definitally want my walls to have an electrical current.
Property is theft.
LOL - I am not usually a William Hurt fan because he tends to be in slow painful movies - but "sheets of plastic that give off light" play a mid-level role in this movie: Rare Birds
There has to be Supply concurrent with demand. There is an amount of time between the time a patent becomes known and the time it can be supplied in which shenanigans can be played.
Your dimmer is reducing the high power spike through the light bulb filament and extending its life (this is assuming you don't get one of those handy "push-on" dimmers that also incorporates a normal switch!)
Most electrical engineers hate to admit it, but electricity often behaves like water, although much faster. If you turn on a water valve, the water pressure in the pipe downstream of the valve can exceed the pressure upstream of the valve for some short period of time (the length of time is related to the existing pressure in the pipe, the length of the pipe, the number of bends in the pipe, etc. etc. etc. on down to ridiculous minutia like temperature and water hardness). This is called by plumbers "water hammer" and if you search the Internet you can probably find pics of enormous pipelines (literally miles of huge pipe) shattering catastrophically due to the effect.
I'm not going to go into how this happens, although it's very interesting (to me, anyway, but I find time delay reflectometry interesting too) but the point here is that the type of valve you use has more effect on the pressure surge than anything else. If your valve restricts the application of pressure - say a 20-turn needle valve for example - instead of suddenly allowing all the pressure through - like a 1/2 turn gate valve - the water hammer is noticeably less, and your pipe will last longer due to less repetitive physical shock being applied.
Incidentally, this is the difference between real science and ivory tower theorizing. In real science the only proof is empirical proof. So-called "mathematical proof" is a powerful tool that can suggest avenues to explore through experimentation, or verify consistency of experimental results, it doesn't actually "prove" anything except that you can make marks on a paper.
Check up this site, for OLED information and news:
http://www.oled-info.com/
that the powercos hate having to expand capacity (high upfront cost that takes a LONG time to pay off) and they are often limited in how much they can push up prices to try and reduce demand by government regulation.
at least here in the uk some powercos seem to be actively pushing cfls
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You do realise that the device you used to write this on uses "component spectra". Also that the human eye works in just this way...
the thing is while two lights may look the same under direct viewing that doesn't mean that surfaces will respond to them in the same way.
monitors are direct viewing so there is no reason to care about CRI
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register