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OLED Breakthrough Yields 75% More Efficient Lights
Mike writes "Researchers at Korea's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology recently announced a breakthrough in OLED technology that reduces the ultra-thin lights' energy consumption by 75%. The discovery hinges upon a new method of creating 'surface plasmon enhanced' organic light emitting diodes that boast 1.75 times increased emission rates and double the light intensity." OLEDnet notes: "The finding was published in the April issue of Applied Physics Letters and the June 25 issue of Optics Express. It will be also featured as the research highlight of the August issue of Nature Photonics and Virtual Journal of Ultrafast Science."
I'm just going to buy lights that are 75% brighter.
If we need to use whales for this then that is fine as long as we start a breeding program to accelerate the replacement of the culled whales. Maybe we could harvest eggs and sperm from harpooned whales, then create embryos and mature them in an artificial uterus, then release them back out to nature to grow where they could be harpooned and the cycle would continue and we could increase the number of whales in the oceans exponentially.
I think we should name the company Mobil-Dick.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The lights radiate 75% more energy. That means a reduction of power of 1 - (1/1.75) = 43%, right?
Now _that_ is a cool name for a scientific journal. I can imagine reading it now...
[Me]: Wow, OLED's use 75% less energy now!
-turns pages-
[Me]: Oh, fusion! That was fast!
I would think the usefulness of these OLEDs would be more for brighter (daylight readable) electronic displays than for hugging trees and crunching granola. Eco friendliness is not the only reason to conserve power; consider for example extended battery life as a more tangible benefit.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Many vapor and physical deposition processes in semiconductor manufacture take place in a high vacuum. Making OLEDs probably already requires a vacuum at one stage for such deposition. I would say the efficiency issues with this process hinge on cost, not energy, and even that seems quite manageable.
It would certainly be modestly more expensive than an otherwise equivalent process that doesn't require a high vacuum step; but vacuum deposition isn't exactly exotic. All sorts of surface metalizing processes use it.
Aside from that, there are applications(actually quite a lot of them) where being able to consume less energy at the point of use, even if you consume more energy overall, is quite valuable. For any "off grid" application(whether permanent, like your survivalist bunker in Montana, or temporary, like your macbook during a trip to starbucks) what really matters is how much energy your device is using now not how much energy it took to create. For that matter, any rechargeable battery is highly wasteful, since a fair bit of the charge energy will just be lost as heat; but having the energy where you need it is obviously valuable. This is the same reason why solar panels became valuable for specific off grid applications well before they reached the break-even point for lifetime energy cost vs. energy production.
It's just 75% increased emission rate, not 75% less energy. Continuous wave photoluminiscence doubles, though, according to the article. 75% more efficient would've been four times the output. So not THAT great, but still rather awesome.
Sounds like a great new technology but I get frustrated when product seems to take forever to get to market.
Many methods for organic device deposition make use of inkjet printing which is extremely low-cost and easy to do (I'm guessing roughly several square miles per day).
They're using silver nanoparticles. Silver isn't cheap, but in that quantity it's not a big deal. Possible improvements to this method include using a different nanoparticle material (but silver is the best for surface plasmon effects, except for maybe gold) and incorporating inkjet printing to avoid high-cost vacuum environments. I don't think an inkjet deposition method would interfere with surface plasmon interactions on the nanoparticles so we should still see good efficiency.
TFA didn't mention lifetime, and I figure that it's not a huge issue anymore for OLEDs. Another big advantage with using silver is that it isn't susceptible to photocorrosion (silver oxides do not form readily).
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
I can tell you that maintaining a high vacuum seal is simple. Orings are amazing things, and the physics that goes along with them is astonishing. That unassuming little black ring really is quite amazing. Forget holding a vacuum; properly designed, they can stand up to 100x atmospheric pressure against a total vacuum and not break a sweat. I'm a scuba diver, and the orings on my scuba tank yoke valve hold up 200 bar, which makes the pressure difference between normal air pressure and a vacuum look like the breath exhaled from the mouth of a sleeping newborn.
I hate printers.
(1) OLED Breakthrough Yields 75% More Efficient Light ...reducing the ultra-thin lightsâ(TM) energy consumption by 75%
(2)
(3) increases photoluminescence emission rates by 1.75 times
(4) increases light intensity twofold.
*Four* numerical figures, and no two of them compatible in any way.
(1): "a 75% more efficient light" would mean an increase to 175% or original, a factor of 1.75 times better.
(2): "reducing by 75%" means a factor of 4 better.
(3): "increases photoluminescence emission rates by 1.75 times" means a 2.75 time increase, a factor of 2.75
(4): "increases light intensity twofold" is a factor of 2.
All incompatible. Wonder what the real numbers are?
That's all well and good but you're not dealing with a setup where a single dust spec will ruin everything. Ultra high vacuum systems don't merely need to hold the pressure, they need to ensure that nothing ( not even slightly too many helium atoms ) can diffuse into the system. To get a basic idea of what is needed of these systems, leaving fingerprints is an absolute no-go since the low pressure will cause the water to evaporate contaminating your setup. Also forget o-rings made out of rubber or any other polymer based material. They are too porous and allow stuff to diffuse through them. The o-rings used in practice for helium tight vacuum systems will be made of a metal alloy that has been carefully picked to be soft enough that you can squeeze it slightly (but not too much ).
Essentially while your scuba gear may be holding a very large pressure that's not quite the same thing as ensuring that it does not have a single atomic scale leak. It's a bit like comparing a fog-horn to a powerful amplifier and then proclaiming the amplifier must be primitive since the foghorn is louder.