University of Florida materials science and engineers have achieved a new record in efficiency of blue organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. Because blue is essential to white light, the advance helps overcome a hurdle to lighting that is much more efficient than compact fluorescents — but can produce high-quality light similar to standard incandescent bulbs.

“The quality of the light is really the advantage,” said Franky So, a UF associate professor of materials science and engineering and the lead investigator on the project.

The U.S. Department of Energy, which funded the research, reported the results on its Web site. Papers about it appeared earlier this year in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

So and his team’s blue OLED achieved a peak efficiency of 50 lumens — a lumen is a measure of brightness perceived by human eyes — per watt. That’s a significant step toward the goal of his project: to achieve white light with efficiency higher than 100 lumens per watt.
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