GE will preview potential OLED lighting application ideas during two industry trade shows this year, Light + Building 2010 in Frankfurt, Germany and LightFair 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. The company will show OLEDs in a number of configurations at both shows, including fixture prototypes that help to demonstrate the expected competitive advantages of GE’s approach to OLEDs: flexibility and an ultra-thin form factor.
“Lighting is becoming more than just a functional, utilitarian aspect of an environment,” says Zoltan Vamos, GE Lighting’s Budapest-based global general manager of lighting technology. “We’re still experimenting and imagining a future with OLEDs but we think our approach will allow us to apply light to literally any surface at a thickness of just a few sheets of paper.”
“OLED technology represents the biggest potential for new product development and advances in the lit environment,” comments Simon Fisher, director of product design with LAPD Lighting Consultants, Lemsford Village, Hertfordshire, UK. “The potential contained within flexible thin film lighting is enormous and holds the key to changing the way we design and coordinate lighting into our architecture and environments.”
According to Sheila Kennedy, AIA, principal of Kennedy & Violich Architecture, Ltd., “OLED technology presents a new material for lighting that appeals to our senses, our creativity and our environment. Imagine an energy efficient, flexible white light that can be produced with a very low-carbon manufacturing footprint and can be designed to bend into lightweight, luminous forms or be integrated into the surfaces of architecture. With flexible OLED materials, GE has the potential to re-invent the fundamental form and industrial ecology of the light bulb.”
Researchers and product development teams from GE Lighting in Cleveland in partnership with Konica Minolta Holdings, Inc., Konica Minolta Technology Center, Inc. (collectively KM) and GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York, have been working together on OLED technology since 2007. GE’s technology partnership with KM, a world leader in imaging products, has enabled GE engineers to tap into KM’s thin-film technology, which plays an important role in the development of highly productive OLEDs.
“The time is right for OLEDs to emerge as an option for consumers, as new energy regulations taking hold around the world are impacting the design, use and disposal of lighting products,” notes Vamos. “OLEDs are a gateway to limitless design possibilities that can keep pace with protocols today and anticipate those yet to come.”
GE has worked with a number of prominent lighting designers, architects and graphic designers, including Fisher and Kennedy, to ensure its early OLED solutions can be used in real-world scenarios. OLED solutions produced as GE and KM envision hold promise for lowering the costs to produce, use and maintain lighting. GE’s OLED solutions will be mercury-free, lightweight and dimmable.
