Researchers Conquer "LED Droop"

sciencehabit writes "Tiny and efficient, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are supposed to be the bright future of illumination. But they perform best at only low power, enough for a flashlight or the screen of your cellphone. If you increase the current enough for them to light a room like an old-fashioned incandescent bulb, their vaunted efficiency nosedives. It's called LED droop, and it's a real drag on the industry. Now, researchers have found a way to build more efficient LEDs that get more kick from the same amount of current—especially in the hard-to-manufacture green and blue parts of the spectrum."

Comments

Let me guess

[busyqth]

The solution is called "LED Viagra"?

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Contact a doctor if you LED lasts more than 100000 hours.

Ahhh that explainsPhilips' LED bulb

[cpu6502]

I guess that's why their new LED burns-up 26 watts but only created the equivalent of a 100 watt bulb. They are losing efficiency because the LEDs are being driven to high powers. (Lower power 25W or 40W bulbs only use 3 and 6 watts.)

Re:Ahhh that explainsPhilips' LED bulb

[ThePeices]

" They are not bulbs, they're bloody diodes!"

Nobody uses bloody diodes for lighting. Not only is it un-hygenic, the loss of efficiency due to transmitting the light through blood is unacceptable, not to mention the red tinge to the light itself.

Everybody uses clean diodes.

Dumb question

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Why must a single LED provide all the light? Couldn't an array of, say, four LEDs, each equivalent to a 25W incandescent and using mirrors and/or lenses to even out the light distribution, get the same efficiency and substitute for a 100W bulb? Am I missing something obvious?

Re:Dumb question

[cheater512]

I'd prefer a led slab. Rather than individual 'bulbs' on the roof illuminating a room, whats wrong with making the roof its self a big led panel.
Very even lighting, the individual leds would be very low current and relatively dim and it would look cool.

Mind you making that much sillicon substrate probably wouldn't be cheap, but you could perhaps cheat a little and use a layer like a screen's backlight has so you have less actual illumination points and it spreads it evenly across the roof.

Re:Dumb question

[Grishnakh]

That's impossible. Lights have to be in a bulb shape, because that's how they've always been, and people don't like change. Look how well circular fluorescent bulbs went over: like a lead balloon. Fluorescent bulbs in general only started taking off in residential applications when they made them so they'd fit in existing fixtures, which themselves aren't significantly changed in 100 years. Even worse, lamps aren't much different from the days when they were powered by gas: anyone who's built their own lamp (the kind that sits on a table, like a reading lamp) knows this: all the "electrical" parts are actually brass rods and fittings that were originally designed for gas, and were repurposed for wires, even though running lamp cord through them (particularly the joints) is a giant PITA and really doesn't make any sense.

Offices can do different things, like use 2x4 fluorescent fixtures, because they're more worried about efficiency (part of operational costs) and because they don't have dimwit cheap-ass home "builders" building them.

Re:Dumb question

[dadioflex]

That's impossible. Lights have to be in a bulb shape, because that's how they've always been, and people don't like change.

I suspect in a lot of households, one half doesn't care what their "light bulbs" look like so long as they save them money, and one half doesn't care how much they cost to run so long as they look right in their decorative light fixtures. Typically the "it has to look right" half wins the buying decision.