February 29, 2008—The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced that it will invest up to $20.6 million in 13 projects to research and develop solid-state lighting (SSL), which includes light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). When combined with industry contributions, the funding will total nearly $28 million.
According to DOE, SSL is an energy-efficient lighting technology that produces significantly less heat than incandescent and fluorescent lights. LEDs have been used in a variety of applications, including brake lights, flashlights and traffic signals, while OLEDs are commonly used for displays in electronic devices such as cell phones, but both technologies reportedly have great potential for energy-efficient general lighting applications.
The selected projects were chosen from three of DOE’s funding opportunity announcements, with $10.8 million allotted for core technology research and $17.1 million allotted for product development projects. Four projects will focus on OLEDs, and the remainder will involve LEDs.
The projects span a wide range of research and development efforts, from understanding the fundamental factors that affect the performance of SSL devices, to developing new substrates to build the devices upon and new phosphors for SSL lamps, to building SSL lamps and incorporating them into complete lighting devices.
DOE recently published the results of its fourth round of solid-state lighting (SSL) product tests, which examined 15 SSL lamps and lighting devices, with five halogen and fluorescent lamps included for comparison.
The results found that SSL manufacturers still have far to go, with about half of the products performing only at the efficiency of halogen lamps, even though the technology is now able to achieve much higher efficiencies.
Of the 15 SSL products, four manufacturers provided no information on light output or efficiency, one provided accurate information, one understated the product performance, and nine overstated the product performance, notes DOE.
Overall, about half of the products produced too little light or off-color light for the intended application.
The report concludes that the SSL technology is now capable of delivering highly efficient, color-balanced light for a wide variety of applications, but its implementation is hampered by manufacturers’ inexperience with the technology and by the lack of industry standardization for LED device performance testing and reporting.
See the results of all four rounds of testing on the DOE SSL Web site.
