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Researchers Create New Cheap, Shatterproof, Plastic Light Bulbs
hattig writes "US researchers say they have developed a new type of lighting that could replace fluorescent bulbs. The new light source is called field-induced polymer electroluminescent (Fipel) technology. It is made from three layers of white-emitting polymer that contain a small volume of nanomaterials that glow when electric current is passed through them. The developer is promising cheap, hard-to-break, mercury-free, highly efficient bulbs from 2013."
A vison of the future is coming to me... I see... Angry old people...Muttering in the aisles at wal-mart...calling their congressman...bitching at dennys...about... what?...I can almost hear it... yes! They're complaining about the phasing out of of the CFL lightbulbs in favor of these new ones...
Everything is cyclical, I guess...
Meanwhile, enjoy this link. http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/20557508
I'm sure dropping some darwin-award-eligable teenager from a flying dead cat drone on the light will cause it to break. Or at least I'll watch it at some point on YouTube.
The linked page to BBC doesnt work - has it been slashdotted?
Cheap to make maybe.
Doubt they'd be cheap to buy for a long time once the capitilists have gotten hold of them.
I wonder what the lifespan of these bulbs is going to be ...
The Light Bulb Conspiracy
That is certainly some illuminating information right there! Looks like things are going to brighten up for the lightbulb consumer market.
/sorry for the bad pun.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Wow, these must be cheap and simplistic if they ended the article with an actual intended release date! That's something you never, ever, ever see with solar panels, magical vehicle engines, and quantum computers. Definitely not....exceeding 90% likely to be vaporware lol.
Great, how what the hell am I supposed to break and jam into people's eye sockets during a fight? A beer bottle? Lame.
Just thought I would ask...
Another example of government regulation killing ^h^h^h^h^h^h driving innovation.
CFL's suck, they are only more efficient than an Incandescent lamp, which is a fairly easy mark to hit. LED's, though more pleasant to use, are marginally more efficient than CFL's, but not as efficient as a standard T8 florescent lamp (100 Lumens per Watt). Polymer based Electro Luminescence is not new; I am very interested in this efficiency they are talking about (which is painfully missing in the article, 5x more than what????)
In fact I'm still using kerosene lamps 'cause I didn't put no trust in that 'lectric light bulb. Now I can jump right past the incandescent era, the cfl era and even the led bulb and have my new house made of glowing plastic embedded with nano particles.
All kidding aside this opens up the possibilities of building this into products in new and innovative ways...
A house that looks like a set from TRON will be within everyone's reach.
All CFL's that I find in the stores are "Made in China" if they are made in the US and are as they claim, I'll gladly try one out; and if they have no problems I might even replace all the bulbs in my house. For now I am stuck with CFL's which I'm afraid of. If you break a CFL it is very dangerious. If you are not suppose to vacum how do you get it out of the carpet?
Because I don't want a three-thin-lines spectrum piece of shit. It fucks up plant life, circadian rhythms and your skin.
Otherwise, EL light is nothing new, and forming a bulb out of it is pretty pointless, when you can already make it into any shape you want, and there are much better shapes than a simple bulb.
But generally, I approve of EL. The technology is nice. As long as they get rid of the annoying high-pitched sound of the transformers. (Even more annoying to dogs who can get really weird and cranky from the constant annoyance.)
An expensive conducting polymer loaded onto glass coated with ITO which "points the way" toward a usable device is nowhere near the vision articulated in the summary.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1566119912004831
- Mike
Must be really new tech. I still can't find a Wikipedia page for Fipel.
The coolest thing is that these things are from 2013; the developer reached into the future and brought some cool tech back in time.
This is no longer needed. Some countries are phasing out even CFLs in favor of LEDs, for example China by 2016 won't allow sale of units over 15w. LEDs are already "shatter proof" and they don't carry any gases inside ("solid state").
China will ban imports and sales of certain incandescent light bulbs starting October 2012 to encourage the use of alternative lighting sources such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), with a 5-year plan of phasing-out incandescent light bulbs over 100 watts starting October 1, 2012, and gradually extend the ban to those over 15 watts on October 1, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/05/us-china-light-bulbs-idUSTRE7A40MV20111105
I have a couple of 10w (4x 2.5w pcs) LED flood lamps, they are too strong for direct lightning but pointing them up allows the light to reflect and diffuse back down nicely. They come up instantly and there is no flickering. Unfortunately they get a little too hot at the base because of the AC/DC transformer, thankfully i'm not enclosing them but overheating could be a problem for others. Perhaps we should adopt some form of DC power distribution inside the house to keep away this conversion from the lamps (and so many devices use DC anyway).
Have you seen white LED street lamps? I have, and they work perfectly. They are also instant (instead of minutes) and the light lets you see many more colors at night. They are about 80w to 100w, instead of the usual 250w, and happen to last 10x more.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
It seems to me a light source that is inherently flat would be ideal for a display backlight. It probably won't make them much thinner than they already are, but it could make them less complex to produce and possibly more repairable (by replacing aged backlights).
Also, being able to attach these directly to walls and ceilings rather than mounting brackets or cutting holes for lamps would allow a wider placement of light sources than is currently practical. I'd probably have (at least) one on every wall plus some on the ceiling, to make sure that I could get an ideal spread of light sources for whatever work I might be doing.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
You mean they actually came out with better light bulbs? I thought government regulation of light bulbs was going to destroy the industry and cause untold damage! You'd have thunk!
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Given that these things include ITO (indium-tin-oxide) and an Ir-based polymer, I'm curious as to how "cheap" these things are likely to be.
Not that the technology isn't interesting... or that they may be reformulated to use less exotic materials. But that's not mentioned anywhere.
CFL's suck, they are only more efficient than an Incandescent lamp, which is a fairly easy mark to hit. LED's, though more pleasant to use, are marginally more efficient than CFL's, but not as efficient as a standard T8 florescent lamp (100 Lumens per Watt).
Depends way too much on the LEDs and "standard" lamp to make a meaningful general comparison; both of them are phosphor-based devices, which gives you a tremendous amount of latitude in trading spectral quality for efficiency.
But I suspect you're talking about dirt-cheap LEDs made with years-old tech and poor QC to boot, or LEDs stuffed into a CFL-like bad compromise design to shoehorn them into an Edison socket, or even both.
100lm/W is not hard with current LEDs if you put them in a dedicated fixture, with lots of LEDs driven more gently and cooled adequately, instead of cramming everything in an incandescent form-factor. They're still kinda silly expensive to do right compared with T8 (thus really only applicable when fluorescents are ruled out for some reason -- for now...), but the main takeaway should be: cramming stuff into incandescent-bulb form-factor is stupid, do it right instead.
I too am looking forward to hard numbers on efficiency and spectral quality. (I'd really like spectrograms. CRI sucks as a metric, but it's better than nothing.)
Only $500 each but guaranteed to last 500 years. Even tho in reality hold up for about 15 minutes. Here we go again.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
A "normal" A19 soft white bulb is about 14.5 Lumens per Watt.
A typical CFL is around 55 Lumens per Watt
A good LED bulb is around 90 Lumens per Watt (and they're getting better)
Fipel bulbs are "Highly Efficient".
Anyone have an idea what that is in Lumens per Watt?
Cheap? I'm old enough to remember the electric company giving out free lightbulbe in exchange for your burnt-out ones. It encouraged electricity use.
Then came the usual corporate-government ripoff partnership where business interests used a left-wing (think: Theodore Roosevelt, Republican) concept of anti-competitive behavior. Phillips sued and a judge, not Congress, decided it shall be illegal.
Most of you are confused by his post because you were trained in a meme-world based on a traditional left-right political axis, rather than a control-vs.-freedom axis, with anarch and dictatorship, facets of the same disease process, on one end, and a free yet secure state on the other, where neither thug nor government offical may seize yer stuff.
This has the additional property of good explanatory and predictive power.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Environmental causes have long been seen as a very liberal thing ...
Not really. The National Park system was vastly expanded by a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt. The Environmental Protection Agency was established by a Republican, Richard Nixon. Hunting organizations, whose members tend to lean right, do far more land conservation than any other type of private organizations.
Certain environmental causes may seem liberal but that has more to do with a specific cause being politicized by liberals not because conservatives are inherently anti-environment. Regrettably both parties tend to automatically contest whatever the other party embraces, it does not matter if the other party embraces something worthwhile.
To me, the meaningful general comparison is what the great unwashed masses are most likely to buy at the value stores, because that's going to represent the largest installed base. And going by what you can buy in blister packs at the discount stores, original poster is demonstrably right on the money.
Arguably, better products can be purchased at higher prices, and geeks who understand the technology and have the disposable income will buy those. But -- let's be realistic for a second -- that's not what Joe Dirt and his family are going to buy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I would say that 2013 is dreamed too soon in this case. It is never too late to compete with LEDs, becasue they are overpriced at the moment. I bet that this guy is not going to sell his bulbs from 2013 on a massive scale, becasue he will need to sell his technology to many factories and then convince the vendors to stock up the bulbs. LEDs needed more than one year to do that and they were invented a while ago already.
~ Best man at your service.
...the plastic uses iridium. That's expensive stuff, even if used in incredibly small quantities:
http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/iridium/
Currently over $1,000 an ounce.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
From the photos, I'd say this is the holy grail of backlighting for arcade marquees! Cut to the dimensions of your marquee and you have even lighting across the whole image!
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Imagine, the sort of panel lighting you see all the time in sci fi. If they can approximate black body spectrum of an incandescent, this would be amazing. I'd line the bottoms of shelves, and install panels on the ceilings and walls, under the edges of steps, under cupboards, even inside cupboards and closets and have light exactly where I need it. It seems that if this works, you can have light panels you can actually cut to size, which would allow for really creative, ultra-modern lighting installations. I would also install panels on the back of my televisions and monitors to provide ambient backlighting to increase the apparent contrast while watching movies.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It seems like so many of these companies that pick up university R&D will simply take it to China who will then walk off with the tech, and put the American company in the ground. So, if this guy was smart, he will keep it local and choose to export bulbs, rather than import.
I guess we're assuming this someone has no dependents and has full medical, life, and funeral insurance?
What about longevity compared to LEDs? Light emitting diodes are supposed to last for 25 years or longer (although LED bulb makers provide warranties of only about 7 years). There seems to be no hard figure for the life expectancy of a Fipel, but Carroll says he’s had one working in his lab for about 10 years.
The reason is that there is next to no heat from it. As such, it should be about as efficient as LEDs, and last a similar time.
What is interesting is that this will be cheap to manufacture compared to LEDs.
Imagine, the sort of panel lighting you see all the time in sci fi.
It's been available since the 1960s. Electroluminescent sheets have been around for over 40 years. They're on the expensive side and light output per unit area is low, but they work fine. Some versions last for decades. (Some don't, which is a big problem for permanent installation.) They make good night lights and somewhat dim display backlights.
Here's a A3 sized white electroluminescent sheet. About 12" x 17", costs $125.
So this is not a new thing. If the new version is a lot brighter or a lot cheaper, it might be useful. For now, it's another "nanotechnology" materials science article about an interesting lab phenomenon.
It still is, and serves as one of the ways (some others: debt, marriage, marijuana) you can tell the difference between a conservative and a Republican.
BBC - 404 - Page Not Found
ScienceDirect - Sorry, your request can't be processed due to a system problem. Contact the Help Desk if the problem persists. [SD-008]
Why?
that way I have no regrets with littering the globe with them. We don't need more petroleum based polymers polluting the globe.
Yes, unless you are such a coward you plan to live your life in a skinner box.
Every single time you cross the street you put yourself in far more danger than you will drinking raw milk. You do realize millions of people have drunk billions of gallons of it, don't you? You're in more danger from hot dog carts, by far (look it up, seriously).
Any idiot who thinks they are doing themselves a favor by decreasing their exposure to common bacteria is an anti-science corporate shill.
See a good doctor. Lasik is not for everyone and as they say, your millage may vary.
I finally decided to see a doctor about it and ended up with intraocular lenses, because I was developing cataracts. Shitty eyes, near-sighted, astigmatism, far-sighted (from age) and then cataracts.
I have worn glasses for more than 40 years so I decided the knife was worth it, if I could regain some vision even if I had to still use glasses; now I can see far without trouble but still have to get the reading glasses on small print, but I CAN SEE
See a doctor, it is worth it. You can't imagine how beautiful it is to wake up, open your eyes and see!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Did somebody mention innovation?
Time to resurrect all those expired light bulb patents by adding "from a light emitting plastic" to every claim!
This is the end of pro wrestling as we know it! How can you have a light tube death match when they're shatterproof?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAyQ1PvBk2o
Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive, an anomaly in the Republican party. A bully and a warmonger, it's no wonder he started the National Park System. Nixon's regrettable start of the EPA came about in the following manner:
_Nixon ended the Vietnam War
_Leftists, now devoid of issues, thrashed around to find new wounds, and found environmentalism.
_Nixon undercut the leftists by forming the EPA
_The leftists temporarily dropped environmentalism like a hot potato because their most hated enemy, Nixon, supported it.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Will it generate radio interference?
It doesn't even mean that... shatter proof means it wont end up in a zillion razor sharp shards for you to step on. It could still be easy to break. Jello is shatter proof...
Depends on how hard you hit it. I hear Jello shatters just FINE if you hit it fast and hard enough.
Of course the sharp fragments don't STAY sharp in the timescales involved in stepping on one of them - or even getting to the floor from the "shattering" event.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way