The CR tests revealed both pros and cons to all types of bulbs and found that while CFLs (compact fluorescents) have improved, the 100-watt-equivalent CFLs might not be quite as bright over their life as the incandescents they replace.  But some of Energy Star-qualified 60-watt CFL equivalents are as bright as regular incandescents, use about 75 percent less energy and last seven to 10 times longer.

Incandescent Left and Florescent Right, Bulbs.

That adds up if the bulb doesn’t die early.  Just one CFL can save you around $50 over its lifetime, and LEDs can save you more than twice that.

The CR ratings results and the questions and answers to the commonly asked light bulb questions can be found in the printed January issue of Consumer Reports and online at the ConsumerReports.org/cro/2012/01/all-about-lightbulbs.html link.

Celia Kuperszmid Lehrman, deputy home editor at Consumer Reports explains the situation and what the report offers consumers saying, “CFLs and LEDs have dramatically improved in the last few years. They produce a warm, flattering light, last much, much longer than incandescent bulbs, and use about 75 percent less energy. But each type has its plusses and minuses. Consumers should consult our Ratings and consider what bulb features are priorities, such as dimming, instant brightness and energy efficiency.”

One of the questions points up the money matter – You’ll spend about $1 a year on average to power an Energy Star LED or CFL, $3.50 for a halogen, and almost $5 for a traditional incandescent bulb, according to the Department of Energy.  That depends on what your kilowatt-hour rate is, but the gain is worthwhile just over the price of free electricity.

On the LED front an LED can save more than twice that of a CFL, but their high initial cost makes it take more time to recoup the upfront cost.  LED production is challenging and expensive, but like other electronic-based products, prices are dropping as demand and performance go up. Meanwhile, look online for rebates from manufacturers and utilities.

LED is likely the coming wave, because LEDs instantly brighten and aren’t affected by frequent on/off cycles and cold temperatures, and many can be dimmed. They use less energy than CFLs and are expected to last even longer, 20,000 to 50,000 operational hours, which should mean something like 20 to 40 years.

For many the halogen is the current best deal until LED technology gets up to speed.  Some halogens use about 25 to 30 percent less energy than standard incandescents, but they cost more and many don’t last much longer.  One is unlikely to save much money. But halogens instantly produce light, are fully dimmable, and cast light evenly. CR will have its test results of 100-watt halogen bulbs out next month.

The proceed carefully flag is still up for LEDs, not all lamp-type LEDs emit light evenly, so have a look at Consumer Reports’ full Ratings and for the Energy Star logo before making a choice and purchase.

Both CFLs and LED raise some hackles on the materials issue.  CFLs still do have a bit of mercury inside and should be handled with care. Effectively cleanup of a broken one is a challenge.  LEDs like other semiconductor chips and electronic circuitry can include lead, arsenic and gallium, but those substances aren’t accessible, even if the bulb breaks. LEDs should be recycled with other electronic waste.

LEDs and CFLs can be taken to Home Deport, Lowe’s, Ikea and others for recycling.  Or check with your local power utility for where to go.

Foe most homes and most sockets there is a bulb that is low cost and will save a bunch of money and electricity. CFLs have come a long way in the past five years and one can expect that LEDs will do the same.  Other than a few long tube florescent fixture types the light has gotten better and costs have come down.  Pay back, the price of the new CFL or LED minus the price of the cumulative old technology needed has closed up pretty well.  The reasons not to save the money are about down to warm up times and dimmability.

Current OLEDs are made of glass substrates and encapsulated between two layers of glass to protect them from external factors like moisture.  Researchers both academic and commercial are working towards replacing both the glass substrate and the encapsulation with flexible foils and thin film layers. Success at commercial scale would enable significant reduction of the production costs of OLEDs because the usage of plastics and flexible foils enables high-speed roll-to-roll fabrication.

Beyond the energy savings that LEDs and OLEDs offer, a thinner and flexible lightweight OLED would set up product design to letting any object in a home or office emit light, and even customized light patterns would become much more affordable.

So the research is very worthwhile.  Now two teams are suggesting they have the answer.
Flip a coin to see who goes first  . . .

Beginning in 2005 the Philips Research of the huge Philips company and now 35 other industrial partners have combined their innovation power at Holst Centre in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.  There Paul Blom and Ton van Mol describe a way of creating thin, flexible sheets of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) using a cheap, newspaper-style “roll-to-roll” printing process.

Making Paper Thin OLEDs. Image Credit: Holst Centre. Click image for the largest view.

The bottom layer of a Holst OLED, which acts as a support, is a flexible material such as a polymer foil that has the electrodes and the light-emitting layer sandwiched on top to make up the complete device. Each layer is between 5 and 200 nanometres thick.

Several hurdles that need to be overcome before OLEDs become a commercial commodity, such as depositing the materials onto a thin film sheet with high precision, managing the properties of the different materials and, most importantly, keeping water out of the device – OLEDs have a barrier requirement up to a thousand times more demanding that food packaging.

Blom and van Mol’s paper is due to appear in the November issue of Physics World. (Link not yet available at post date.)  As noted above, with Philips and 35 other industrial firms on the inside track, providing resources, you can be pretty sure the going to scale matter was an early research parameter.

In North America engineering researchers at the University of Toronto, Canada, have developed “the world’s most efficient organic light-emitting diodes” on plastic. The result enables a flexible form factor, not to mention a less costly, alternative to traditional OLED manufacturing on rigid glass.

The Toronto team is going for the dominant technology for advanced electronic screens that are already used in some high-end cell phones and other smaller-scale applications.

Creating the Digital Displays of Tomorrow from U of T Engineering on Vimeo.

Professor Zheng-Hong Lu a materials science and engineering professor and the Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Organic Optoelectronics said, “For years, the biggest excitement behind OLED technologies has been the potential to effectively produce them on flexible plastic.”

Device Structure of the Flexible OLED. Click image for more info.

The research, which was supervised by Lu and led by PhD candidates Zhibin Wang and Michael G. Helander, demonstrated the first high-efficiency OLED on plastic. The performance of their device is comparable with the best glass-based OLEDs, while providing the benefits offered by using plastic.

An excited Lu said, “This discovery, unlocks the full potential of OLEDs, leading the way to energy-efficient, flexible and impact-resistant displays.”

Wang and Helander were able to re-construct the property previously limited to glass by using a 50-100 nanometre thick layer of an advanced optical thin-film coating material. This advanced coating technique, when applied on flexible plastic, allowed the team to build the highest efficiency OLED device ever reported with a glass-tree design.

The results are reported online in the latest issue of Nature Photonics.

The team believes it has a full potential OLED on flexible plastic and are report high-efficiency phosphorescent OLEDs using a thin-film outcoupling enhancement method that does not depend on high-index substrates.  This too, could be very close to commercially ready.

The OLED is a very pleasant light source and works well, if currently expensive, used in display screens.  Getting to simple lighting needs a very steep drop in costs, and these two teams are well on the way to getting there.

LED and OLED are both much preferable to the harshness of florescent and can fairly be expected to be superior to incandescent too.  Added up lighting uses a lot of electricity and the LED and OLED offer a much less expensive way to light things up.  They can’t come too soon.

University of Miami professor at the College of Engineering, Jizhou Song, has helped design a LED lamp that uses an array of LEDs one hundred times smaller than today’s conventional LEDs. Some clever build research is paying off with a lab sample with 100 LEDs on a chip.

100 LEDs on a Chip. Research on LED building at the University of Miami. Click image for the largest view.

The new device has design flexibility, maintains lower temperature and has an increased life span over existing LEDs. The findings have been published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. These may be small, but its no small progress step.

The point of the effort at Miami was focused on improving certain features of LED lights, like size, flexibility and temperature. Song’s role in the project was to analyze the thermal management and establish an analytical model that reduces the temperature of the device.

Song explains his model saying, “The new model uses a silicon substrate, novel etching strategies, a unique layout and innovative thermal management method. The combination of these manufacturing techniques allows the new design to be much smaller and keep lower temperatures than current LEDs using the same electrical power.”

Not satisfied with that the multi university team would also like to make the device stretchable, so that it can be used on any surface, such as deformable display monitors and biomedical devices that adapt to the curvilinear surfaces of the human body.

The paper at the National Academy has a pretty complete review of the build of the new LED design.  One can even get a good grasp of the technology from the supporting information. The pleasant surprise is the tiny LEDs when laid out carefully on the chip can be cooled without an airflow or other cooling apparatus.  The design simply uses direct thermal transport through the thin-film metallization used for the electrical interconnect.  That allows for providing an enhanced and scalable means to integrate the devices into modules for white light generation.

Miami’s press release results introduces an impressive team including John Rogers, the Lee J. Flory Founder Chair in Engineering and professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, senior authors include Ralph Nuzzo, G. L. Clark professor of Chemistry at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Yonggang Huang, Joseph Cummings professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University.

The study paper title “Unusual Strategies for Using Indium Gallium Nitride Grown on Silicon (111) for Solid-State Lighting” could also be “Thoughtful engineering expertise creates a high potential LED design.”

If these fellows can build an LED that could be stretched over a hemisphere at good cost savings the commercial scale will come.

There will be lots of industry engineers checking the study paper very carefully.  Its very good work and makes one wonder what more can come from the strategy.

Silicon Wafer at 8" with GaN Applied. Click image for the largest view. Image credit Bridgelux.

Light-emitting diodes are expected to be the new-wave components in many lighting applications because of their superior energy efficiency and longevity. A key barrier to their wider use is high cost – $40 price tags aren’t uncommon for 60-watt equivalent bulbs – and that’s where silicon could come in.

Today’s LEDs are fabricated on substrates of relatively costly materials such as sapphire or silicon carbide. Most companies are putting their efforts in trying to use larger substrates of the same materials to drive down costs.

A different approach is move to silicon, the foundation of computer-integrated circuit chips. Besides the cost advantage of the material, the approach could theoretically make use of the many older and obsolescing semiconductor factories that are inexpensive to operate.

Bill Watkins, known for a high-profile stint as CEO of computer hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate Technology, leads Bridgelux.  If the astonishing drop of disk storage costs are an indicator, then Watkins is quite believable on driving down the price of LEDs.

Watkins explains the issues – the problem is that silicon is much more difficult to work with for LED applications. The effort typically requires depositing the material gallium nitride (GaN) on silicon wafers, and the results usually fall far short of the performance of LEDs made with conventional materials.

But last week, March 8, 2011, Bridgelux said it has managed to use eight-inch silicon wafers to make components that achieved 135 lumens per watt – essentially reaching commercial-grade performance with the material for the first time. It will take two or three years to improve production yields to make the process commercially viable, but Watkins sees no barriers to using the approach to reduce production costs by 75%.

That’s not a misprint or typo, 75%.  That would bring the $40 dollar light down to $10.  This is a major shift, and the energy savings would cover that much quicker.

Now don’t underestimate Watkins and his team.  He’s quoted on the company website saying, “This is a game-changer around the whole cost structure. We think we can get to $5 bulbs.”  Now the figure is only $5 per bulb.  Looking good.

Meanwhile – Lattice Power Corporation believes its possible to produce the crack-free, low-defect-density films demanded by high-power LEDs by turning to a patterned substrate and a multi-layer buffer on the silicon.

CREE already has very expensive LEDs for sale on silicon.  So it’s possible, but very expensive so far.  Silicon based GaN LEDs have been attracting researchers in universities and industry for many years, due to their promise of large-scale production and compatibility with the IC manufacturing platform.

The difficulty in manufacturing high performance GaN-on-silicon LEDs is the material stress that results from a combination of lattice mismatch and thermal expansion mismatch.

Lattice Power, which is based in Nanchang, China says it is possible to use special ‘epistructures’, novel substrate designs and sophisticated growth techniques to make GaN-on-silicon structures that lead to high-performance, high-reliability LEDs.

GaN Cracking on Silicon. Click image for the largest view. Image credit: Lattice.

The problem in simple terms is when building an LED the temperatures can be 1000º C.  When cooled the difference in contraction is about 40%.  The result is that material cracking occurs, sometime massively, resulting in no current flow and no light emitted.

If that’s not bad enough, silicon absorbs light.  So in order to have LEDs operate efficiently the silicon substrate must be liberated from the device by adding a thin-film, vertical structure.

That’s where Lattice is working – GaN is grown on a prepared, patterned silicon substrate. A metal contact is deposited on the p-side of the GaN film. This acts as a light reflector adding reflective benefits to the device.

One more problem.  GaN-on-silicon substrate is highly stressed, so there are genuine concerns regarding its long-term reliability.  Lattice is in testing now for commercial production procedures.

That’s where the nascent LED industry leaders who’ve ‘outed’ themselves are today.  Watkins bold announcement is dramatic enough to force others to disclose their progress. “This will shake everybody out,” he says.

Consumers can look forward to better and lower cost LEDs pretty soon.  The Bridgelux announcement might not have lots of technical detail, but for sure – it is a gauntlet thrown down, and thrown hard.  The high performance LED game is on.

Bedair explains, LED lighting relies on GaN thin films to create the diode structure that produces light. The new technique reduces the number of defects in those films by two to three orders of magnitude. “This improves the quality of the material that emits light. So, for a given input of electrical power, the output of light can be increased by a factor of two – which is very big,” he said.  This is particularly true for low electrical power input and for LEDs emitting in the ultraviolet range.

LED Diagram.

LEDs are an increasingly popular technology for use in energy-efficient lighting and should overtake the compact florescent lamps with continued price reductions.  A doubling of the output per unit or per power consumption has to help in production costs, driving to lower prices.

The NCSU team research focused on the common GaN thin films used to create the diode structure that produces light beginning with a GaN film that was two microns, or two millionths of a meter, thick and embedded half of that thickness with large voids – empty spaces that were one to two microns long and 0.25 microns in diameter. The researchers found that defects in the film were drawn to the voids and became trapped – leaving the portions of the film above the voids with far fewer defects.

Defects are slight dislocations in the crystalline structure of the GaN films. These dislocations run through the material until they reach the surface. By placing voids in the film, the researchers effectively placed a “surface” in the middle of the material, preventing the defects from traveling through the rest of the film.

The voids make an impressive difference.

Bedair says, “Without voids, the GaN films have approximately 10[to the 10th power] defects per square centimeter. With the voids, they have 10[to the 7th power] defects. This technique would add an extra step to the manufacturing process for LEDs, but it would result in higher quality, more efficient LEDs.”

The paper, “Embedded Voids Approach for Low Defect Density in Epitaxial GaN Films,” published online Jan. 17 by Applied Physics Letters describes developing defect reductions in GaN epitaxial films grown on sapphire substrates. This technique relies on the generation of high densities of embedded microvoids (~108/cm2), a few microns long and less than a micron in diameter. These voids are located near the sapphire substrate, where high densities of dislocations are present. The network of embedded voids offer free surfaces that act as dislocation sinks or termination sites for the dislocations generated at the GaN/sapphire interface.

The paper was co-authored by Bedair and El-Masry with Pavel Frajtag, a Ph.D. student at NC State and Dr. N. Nepal, a former post-doctoral researcher at NC State now working at the Naval Research Laboratory. The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office.

This research looks to pay off handsomely for commercial makers looking to produce high value LED products.  Cutting the power consumption in half is remarkable, and a review hints that even more improvement is possible if not probable.  One has to wonder just how well an LED with no or near no defects might perform.

This writer finds the LED light output preferable to florescent and eagerly looks forward to more and better LED products.  Lets hope all manufacturers notice this work and the team stays at the effort to improve the LED.

The research effort is to improve quaternary alloy semiconductor nanowire materials. Quaternary alloys are made of semiconductors with four elements, often made by alloying two or more compound semiconductors.  Semiconductors are the material basis for technologies such as solar cells, high-efficiency LEDs for lighting, and for visible and infrared detectors.

Quaternary Semiconductor Alloy ZnCdSSe Nano Wires. Click image for more info.

One critical parameters of semiconductors to determine the feasibility for these technologies is called the band gap. The band gap of a semiconductor determines, for example, if a given wavelength of sunlight that is absorbed or left unchanged by the semiconductor in a solar cell and determines what color of light an LED emits.  To gain efficiency and light spectrum emissions, it’s necessary to increase the range of band gaps.

The problem is that every manmade or naturally occurring semiconductor has only a specific band gap.

One standard way to broaden the range of band gaps is to alloy two or more semiconductors. By adjusting the relative proportion of two semiconductors in an alloy, it’s possible to develop new band gaps between those of the two semiconductors.  But accomplishing this requires a condition called lattice constant matching, which requires similar inter-atomic spaces between two semiconductors to be grown together.

Ning explains, “This is why we cannot grow alloys of arbitrary compositions to achieve arbitrary band gaps. This lack of available band gaps is one of reasons current solar cell efficiency is low, and why we do not have LED lighting colors that can be adjusted for various situations.”

During the latest attempts to grow semiconductor nanowires with “almost” arbitrary band gaps, the research team used a new approach to produce an extremely wide range of band gaps.  They alloyed two semiconductors, zinc sulfide (ZnS) and cadmium selenide (CdSe) to produce the quaternary semiconductor alloy ZnCdSSe, which produced continuously varying compositions of elements on a single substrate (a material on which a circuit is formed or fabricated).  Ning says this the first time a quaternary semiconductor has been produced in the form of a nanowire or nanoparticle.

By controlling the spatial variation of various elements and the temperature of a substrate (called the dual-gradient method), the team produced light emissions that ranged from 350 to 720 nanometers on a single substrate only a few centimeters in size.  The color spread across the substrate can be controlled to a large degree, and Ning says he believes this dual-gradient method can be more generally applied to produce other alloy semiconductors or expand the band gap range of these alloys.

To explore the use of quaternary alloy materials for making photovoltaic cells more efficient, the team has developed a lateral multi-cell design combined with a dispersive concentrator.  The concept of dispersive concentration, or spectral split concentration, has been explored for decades. But the typical current design application uses a separate solar cell for each wavelength band, an expensive proposition.

With the new materials, Ning hopes to build a monolithic lateral super-cell that contains multiple subcells in parallel, each optimized for a given wavelength band. The multiple subcells can absorb the entire solar spectrum. Such solar cells will be able to achieve extremely high efficiency with low fabrication cost. The team is working on both the design and fabrication of such solar cells.

Parallel to that the new quaternary alloy nanowires with large wavelength span can be explored for color-engineered light applications in light emitting diodes.  The researchers have demonstrated that color control through alloy composition control can be extended to two spatial dimensions, a step closer to color design for direct white light generation or for color displays.

The research news is built on prior work.  The most interesting is published at the Journal of the American Chemical Society “Quaternary Alloy Semiconductor Nanobelts with Bandgap Spanning the Entire Visible Spectrum”. In another paper published at the American Chemical Society’s Nano “Spatial Composition Grading of Quaternary ZnCdSSe Alloy Nanowires with Tunable Light Emission between 350 and 710 nm on a Single Substrate” the team discusses growing spatially composition-controlled alloys by combining spatial source reagent gradient with a temperature gradient.

The research is far from commercial, but the discussion’s bait is low cost.  Should this get to scales of manufacturing in either LEDs or photovoltaic cells both solar production and energy use would have considerable improvements in efficiency.

But these are not fully organic; they usually contain a transparent electrode made of the metal alloy indium tin oxide.  The indium alloy presents a problem because indium is both rare, expensive and is complicated to recycle.

An OLED consists of a light-generating layer of plastic placed between two electrodes, one of which must be transparent. Now researchers at Linköping and Umeå universities, working with American colleagues at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Rutgers University, are presenting an alternative to OLEDs, an organic light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC). It’s inexpensive to produce, and the transparent electrode is made of the carbon material graphene.

Graphene Cathode in a Light Emitting Electrochemical Cell. Click image for the largest view.

The research group is utilizing chemically derived graphene for the transparent cathode in an all-plastic sandwich-structure device.  Using a screen-printable conducting polymer as a partially transparent anode and a micrometer-thick active layer solution-deposited from a blend of a light-emitting polymer and a polymer electrolyte, they’ve demonstrated a light-emitting device based solely on solution-processable carbon-based materials. The results demonstrate that low-voltage, inexpensive, and efficient light-emitting devices can be made without using metals. In other words, electronics can truly be “organic”.

Nathaniel Robinson from Linköping University says, “This is a major step forward in the development of organic lighting components, from both a technological and an environmental perspective. Organic electronics components promise to become extremely common in exciting new applications in the future, but this can create major recycling problems. By using graphene instead of conventional metal electrodes, components of the future will be much easier to recycle and thereby environmentally attractive.”

All of the new LEC’s parts can be produced using fluid solutions, making it possible to make LECs in a roll-to-roll process such as a printing press in a highly cost-effective way.

Ludvig Edman from Umeå University says, “This paves the way for inexpensive production of entirely plastic-based lighting and display components in the form of large flexible sheets. This kind of illumination or display can be rolled up or can be applied as wallpaper or on ceilings.”

The graphene used in the production process consists of a single layer of carbon atoms and has many attractive properties as an electronic material. It has high conductivity, is virtually transparent, and can be produced as a solution in the form of graphene oxide.

For over 15 years researchers worldwide have been trying to replace the indium tin oxide component.  Indium is in short supply, and the alloy has a complicated life cycle. The raw material for the fully organic and metal-free LEC, on the other hand, is essentially inexhaustible and can be fully recycled, back into a fuel, for example.  A non rare earth metallic mixed device is going to be much less expensive and less of a problem when recycled.

A study paper has been published in the journal ACS Nano and is titled “Graphene and Mobile Ions: The Key to All-Plastic, Solution-Processed Light-Emitting Devices.” The authors are Piotr Matyba, Hisato Yamaguchi, Goki Eda, Manish Chhowalla, Ludvig Edman, and Nathaniel D. Robinson.

Well . . . If this scales up commercially those coming generations of TVs might be sandwich built way under an inch thick and much less expensive.  Video could get more pervasive than it already is  – as if that’s possible.  Imagining walls and ceilings that glow sounds interesting, but the sensation is yet to be experienced.

But power consumption should be very low.  To brighten areas where the amibiance isn’t a critical part of the design this invention should get rapid adoption.

On the other hand, the light might be just wonderful.  LED and one hopes this new LEC will be free of the oscillations many of us find annoying in fluorescent lit areas. The lumens per installed area are still to come out, the color temperature and other bits of interest will be topics for development.

Wait . . . Wallpaper?  If the love of my life who has a penchant for wallpaper and changing it finds out . . . Lets hope that the pink spectrum is impossible.  Well, I can hope.

Vu1’s introduction is for their Electron Stimulated Luminescence (ESL™ ) technology that is most simply described as uniquely applying much of the science that has been proven over a long period of time in television and computer monitor technology. Vu1 has taken the old basic technology and simplified it. Then they made improvements in uniform electron gun distribution, energy efficiency, phosphor performance and the manufacturing costs. Even more simply, monitor and TV technology is based on delivering an electron “beam.” The complication comes from turning pixels on and off very quickly to make the picture. ESL technology on the other hand is based on uniformly delivering a “spray” of electrons that illuminates a large surface very energy efficiently over a long lifetime.  If their product is as good as some of those ancient TVs that never stop working, this company is really on to something.

Vu1’s bulb can be manufactured to match essentially any light color that consumer demand dictates. If the warm, yellowish glow of the incandescent bulb is what’s desired by consumers then Vu1 will produce the ESL bulbs that provide that color.  The new bulbs offer.  The bulbs are also dimmable across the full range because of the native design. This means that a bulb can be smoothly dimmed across the entire range from high (fully on) to low (almost off). One very good feature is, when turned on, the bulbs return instantly to the dimming state they were in when turned off, no blast of near full output each time it’s activated.

Energy efficiency is a key item of course.  Similar to the compact florescent the new ESL bulb generates the same useful light output but uses about approximately 65-70% less energy compared to standard incandescent. That’s the number that matters in the economy when 22% of the grid’s power goes to lighting – a full utilization would cut that back to fewer than 8% freeing some 14% for other uses.

Another point of view for the energy efficiency is the power factor.  The power factor for an AC electric power system is defined as the ratio of the real power to the apparent power, and is measured to a number between 0 and 1 (or Unity). Low power factor loads increase losses in a power distribution system and result in increased energy costs. The power factor for an incandescent bulb is 1, but for compact florescent its only 0.52. Although residential users are only charged for the power used by the lamp, the power company must deliver full power to match the real load.  Vu1’s bulb gets to a power factor just over 0.93, close to that of an incandescent, making for a happy grid.

An ESL is said to last up to 6,000 hours, about five to six times the lifespan of an incandescent and comparable to the compact florescent. But they produce some warmth, still 50 percent less heat than an incandescent.

According to Vu1 spokesman James Quick, Vu1 might market the first model of the bulb in mid-2010 if its funding holds up. It plans to begin manufacturing at its Czech Republic plant by the end of this year due to some EU countries’ rules making incandescent unavailable sooner than the U.S. market.

Light Bulb Comparison Table

LED bulbs are even more energy efficient and last around 40,000 to 50,000 hours a bulb but tend to be much expensive to purchase while operating costs are the lowest so far. For many the LED light is going to be an issue unless some cost and light breakthroughs are made, the ESL technology has a giant market entry set up ready to exploit.
The Vu1 point that it’s ESL bulbs would produce light that’s “essentially indistinguishable” from an incandescent, contrasting it with the greenish or bluish light from CFLs and LEDs could well prove to be a major advantage.

Yet there remains a problem.  Quick says Vu1′s ESL bulb would be around $20 when it hits the market, and that’s about triple of what they can expect to get away with.  The firm is going to have to have a massive capitalization and market penetration effort that’s successful or come up with another plan.  $20 for 6000 or so hours will cut it, while $7 is just competitive.  Relying on the mandates to eliminate the incandescent in a market with so many other technologies is risky to say the least.

Yet the technology and its offerings are really compelling.  It takes a top of the line compact florescent to not be a tedious light when reading, examining photos or other color sensitive activities.  Incandescent is familiar, but coming up with a warm bulb, or a true color bulb and other market segments might give an advantage.

It’s a really promising technology.  But time will tell if the business model that Vu1 is using will get to low enough prices that bring production volumes.  I sure hope they make good choices; the video makes the product’s potential look great.

Using an ultra-powerful laser the new process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb can.  Cheaper and better, great huh.  The global warming campaign is beginning to bite in unforeseen ways.

The laser process creates a unique array of nano- and micro- scale structures on the surface of a regular tungsten filament, the tiny wire inside a light bulb.  These structures make the tungsten become far more effective at radiating light.  Guo’s and his assistant, Anatoliy Vorobyev’s findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Guo, associate professor of optics says, “We’ve been experimenting with the way ultra-fast lasers change metals, and we wondered what would happen if we trained the laser on a filament.  We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament. When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb’s energy usage.”  Now that’s a bright flash of intuition, too.  He could have saved an industry.

The fun numbers are in the key to creating the super-filament. Using an ultra-brief, ultra-intense beam of light called a femtosecond laser pulse, the laser burst lasts only a few quadrillionths of a second. To understand and quantify that kind of speed, consider that a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 32 million years.  So, during its brief burst, Guo’s laser unleashes as much power “as the entire grid of North America” onto a spot the size of a needlepoint. That intense blast forces the surface of the metal to form nanostructures and microstructures that dramatically alter how efficiently light can radiate from the filament.  It sounds a little like a hammer on the wire smoothing up the surface.

Back in 2006, Guo and Vorobyev, used a similar laser process to turn any metal pitch black. The surface structures created on the metal were incredibly effective at capturing incoming radiation, such as light.

Guo says, “There is a very interesting ‘take more, give more’ law in nature governing the amount of light going in and coming out of a material.”

Since the black metal was extremely good at absorbing light, he and Vorobyev set out to study the reverse process—that the blackened filament would radiate light more effectively as well.  Guo says, “We knew it should work in theory, but we were still surprised when we turned up the power on this bulb and saw just how much brighter the processed spot was.”

Now for this – in addition to increasing the brightness of a bulb, Guo’s process can be used to tune the color of the light as well. In 2008, his team used a similar process to change the color of nearly any metal to blue, golden, and gray, in addition to the black they’d already accomplished. Guo and Vorobyev used that knowledge of how to control the size and shape of the nanostructures—and thus what colors of light those structures absorb and radiate—to change the amount of each wavelength of light the tungsten filament radiates. Though Guo cannot yet make a simple bulb shine pure blue, for instance, he can change the overall radiated spectrum so that the tungsten, which normally radiates a yellowish light, could radiate a more purely white light.

Now for the photo folks, Guo’s team has even been able to make a filament radiate partially polarized light, which until now has been impossible to do without special filters that reduce the bulb’s efficiency. By creating nanostructures in tight, parallel rows, some of the light that emits from the filament becomes polarized.

Next, the team is working to discover what other aspects of a common light bulb they might be able to control.

Despite the incredible intensity involved, the femtosecond laser can be powered by a simple wall outlet.  The laser must have a very good capacitor set.  This suggests that when the process is refined, implementing it commercially to augment regular light bulbs should be relatively simple.

Getting the same amount of radiated luminosity for 60% of the power is a good deal.  Its not as good as the compact florescent, but close, and could well have saved the business in the U.S.  It still might if some clever lawyering and marketing is employed.  For those of us who are discomforted by the frequency of florescent that would be very good news.

Incandescent isn’t bad at all or inefficient when used correctly.  They are suitable whenever the furnace is running or you’re adding warmth to a space.  No energy is wasted.  I grant that incandescent bulbs aren’t a smart choice because they add heat – then we use energy to move it away, but for much of the populated world, incandescent is a fine idea and useful choice in lighting.

Adding the Rochester team’s innovation will make for a much better bulb that costs less to use and gives off better light.  It may even save consumers money and save on energy.  It’s just a shame that political pressure and weak character in politicians has loaded a new cost on consumers that will diminish these folks’ good work.  It won’t be as low cost as it could be and that’s exclusively a result of politicians doing what government has never done successfully.