The size of a semitrailer, it coats an 8-inch wide plastic film with chemicals, then seals them with a layer of metal foil. Apply electric current to the resulting sheet, and it lights up with a blue-white glow.
GE plans to build a larger machine that can print panels several feet wide. Its output could be sold commercially as early as 2010, Duggal said, but he acknowledged that’s a “very aggressive” goal.
Since the production runs will be small by then, the prices won’t be accessible to the average consumer. But the luminous OLEDs could show up in niche, luxury settings, like casinos or fancy restaurants, where the thin and flexible lights could allow the creation of striking architectural or artistic effects.
He projects that OLED lighting sales could reach $5.9 billion by 2015.
http://www.oled-display.net/oled-lighting
Bob Sagebiel, technical marketing manager for lighting at distributor Arrow Electronics Inc., is less optimistic. Because OLEDs are so different from current lighting technology, they could have a hard time being accepted by the market, he believes. An OLED panel won’t fit in any of the 20 billion light-bulb sockets worldwide, he noted. Commercial buildings will probably need rewiring to take advantage of big panels that don’t fit into existing fixtures for fluorescent tubes.
Looking ahead a few more years, printing could reduce the cost of OLEDs to little more than the cost of the stuff it’s printed on, said Janice Mahon, vice president of technology commercialization at Universal Display Corp. in Ewing, New Jersey. The company is a leader in OLED research, and develops some of the organic compounds, which are akin to the dyes used to color clothes. If printed on metal foil, the cost of an OLED light could be less than a dollar per square foot, Mahon said.
You could tack that sheet to a wall, wrap it around a pillar or even take a translucent version and tape it to your windows. Unlike practically every other source of lighting, you wouldn’t need a lamp or conventional fixture for these sheets, though you would need to plug them into an outlet.
The sheets owe their luminance to compounds known as organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. While there are plenty of problems to be worked out with the technology, it’s not the dream of a wild-eyed startup.
OLEDs are beginning to be used in TVs and cell-phone displays, and big names like Siemens and Philips are throwing their weight behind the technology to make it a lighting source as well. The OLED printer was made by General Electric Co. on its sprawling research campus here in upstate New York. It’s not far from where a GE physicist figured out a practical way to use tungsten metal as the filament in a regular light bulb. That’s still used today, nearly a century later.
The invention of the incandescent bulb created the pattern for home lighting: Our light sources are small and bright. Maybe there are a few in the center of the ceiling, and a few in the corners of the room. Because they’re too bright to look at, they need to be reflected and diffused with lamp shades and frosted glass.
OLEDs could overturn all that, with broad, diffuse light sources bathing rooms in a gentle glow. Photographers go to great lengths to diffuse the illumination they use when shooting portraits, because they know we look our best in soft light.
The big glowing sheets could also make light sources out of everyday things. GE imagines putting OLEDs on the inside of window blinds — pull them down, light them up, and you have light streaming from the window, even at night. You could even make OLED wallpaper, since the material is flexible.
“We have a lot of ideas for what we can do with it,” said German lighting designer Ingo Maurer.
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