Lighting Efficiency

Lighting efficiency helps to reduce energy consumption. Incandescent lights are not very efficient due to heat generation. Solid State Lighting (SSL) that uses semi-conducting materials to convert electricity into light is the new emerging efficient lighting technology. It is estimated that by 2025 SSL could reduce the global amount of electricity used for lighting by 50%, alleviating the need of 133 new power stations (1000 MW each).

SSL encompasses different types of technologies including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). LEDs, provide point sources such as incandescent lamps while OLEDs might replace area sources such as fluorescent lamps. LEDs have already begun to replace incandescent bulbs in applications requiring durability and compactness.

UF researchers have been working on both LED and OLED technology. LED research is GaN-Based Semiconductors - visible light emitting diodes. The photos below show some of the applications.

The UF researchers are working towards fabricating microcavity OLEDs with down-conversion phosphors to achieve efficacy exceeding 100 lm/W, which is about 6-7 times the efficacies of incandescent light bulbs.