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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."
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.
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
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...
Why would they? I'm all for cynicism and conspiracy theories, but try to come up with something more plausible.
For instance, the *power companies* buying the patents and shelving them.
That's also bunk, but it at least has a hint of financial incentive to it.
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 ?
In an ideal world, you wouldn't be using neither gas, oil, nor electricity for heating your house (at least not as the main source). There are plenty of more environmentally friendly heat sources available, like heat pumps, wood, solar power and so on.
Also, in case you don't live in a really cold climate, the added heat output won't do any good at all - it will only waste energy, and even worse - if you're using an AC it will need even more energy to cool your house.
As a comparison, there are heaterless homes built in Gothenburg, Sweden. The only heating needed comes from the inhabitants and their appliances (fridge, TV, computer(s), stove etc), the insulation is good enough to keep the house warm with the help of ventilation air heat exchangers.
As another comparison, I've heard that a modern office building in Kiruna (northernmost town in Sweden) needs cooling 90% of the year...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I remember somewhere around 10 years ago i started seeing 'paper' products in the grocery stores made from cotton. Paper towles, TP that sort of stuff. i thought cool an alternative to wood. Sometime after that NPR did a story on the people who started the company and they talked about how popular the products were and how they were looking to expand, things were looking great. Then like six months later the cotton paper products were no longer available, anywhere. My guess is that the paper product manufacturers got together bought the rights and mothballed the idea?
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.
It generally doesn't, because of the conversion and transmission losses. Heating by electricity is more expensive than heating by gas, because the power plant has to burn more gas to supply that electricity than you would have had to burn yourself to heat your hom directly. If gas prices were to rise, then electricity prices would rise along with them (and have been doing just that).
However, in some circumstances this may change; if, say, the Russians were to cut off the gas supplies to Europe, it might make sense for the French to just leave on their lightbulbs, because their nuclear-supplied electricity would suddenly be preferable to burning what little expensive gas is available. And if you happen to live in Iceland, then you may as well please yourself, you lucky sods with your cheap clean geothermal power...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
If you really want to break it down to costs, keep in mind the price difference between each item. If the new more efficient bulb is 10x more expensive, you have to save that much in energy costs just to break even in the long run. This is the main reason why you don't see more houses have motion-sensed switches. The amount of energy you save by automatically shutting off lights will take many years to just pay the extra costs of the switches. In addition, this is also the same reasn why Hybrids are not economically. By the time you save money on fuel to pay the difference in the price of the car, you'll more than likely have to replace the batteries. I hear that's around $5k. That's a lot of gasoline!
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