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Accidents Happen

stubeeef

stubeeef

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Aug 10, 2004
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The main light source of the future will almost surely not be a bulb. It might be a table, a wall, or even a fork.

An accidental discovery announced this week has taken LED lighting to a new level, suggesting it could soon offer a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative to the traditional light bulb. The miniature breakthrough adds to a growing trend that is likely to eventually make Thomas Edison's bright invention obsolete.

LEDs are already used in traffic lights, flashlights, and architectural lighting. They are flexible and operate less expensively than traditional lighting.

Happy accident

Michael Bowers, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, was just trying to make really small quantum dots, which are crystals generally only a few nanometers big. That's less than 1/1000th the width of a human hair.

Quantum dots contain anywhere from 100 to 1,000 electrons. They're easily excited bundles of energy, and the smaller they are, the more excited they get. Each dot in Bower's particular batch was exceptionally small, containing only 33 or 34 pairs of atoms.

When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant color. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened.

"I was surprised when a white glow covered the table," Bowers said. "The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow."

Then Bowers and another student got the idea to stir the dots into polyurethane and coat a blue LED light bulb with the mix. The lumpy bulb wasn't pretty, but it produced white light similar to a regular light bulb.

White light from Bowers' lumpy new bulb. Credit: Vanderbilt University
The new device gives off a warm, yellowish-white light that shines twice as bright and lasts 50 times longer than the standard 60 watt light bulb.

This work is published online in the Oct. 18 edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Click to expand...

Sounds awesome to me. I now use mostly compact flurescent bulbs now in my house, most are 14 watts and give a 60watt light, so 28 watts gives me about 120 watt equivalent. These would be much better!
 
Some guy outfitted his entire house illuminated with white LEDs. Read this story on Slashdot about a year ago. He saved quite a bit on electricity as well. This new discovery sounds very promising.
 
I love reading stories like these - thanks for the link! Don't know when this would become practical and we would start seeing it commercially, but cool nonetheless!
 
That's quite cool and I'd love to have a wall you could *paint* these dots on and have them shine when needed. Very cool stuff.

I think one of the reasons we haven't seen more of an effort for better lighting is that the bulbs work nicely enough and the need replacing often. All the companies making the bulbs aren't going to want to have to give that up any time soon.

D
 
Not to be bragging, but coming from Eindhoven we are used to a LOT of futurist ways in which to use light. Eindhoven is both home of Philips, one of the largest and certainly most influential innovators in light and the Design Academy, which even foreign newspapers as the NY Times call the most influential industrial design academy in the world. Now imagine Philips Light Research, Philips Design and the Design Academy sharing the same building. We just had the graduation exposition this week (just visited it yesterday ANd today) with lots of mindbaffling innovations again, some including lights/lamps of course.
One recent innovation from Philips Design were pillows on which you could SMS messages. The light's were directly woven into the fabric, you couldnt see them. So you would sit on your couch tres relaxed when your pillow starts flashing beneath you.
Perhaps not as sci-fi as the OP's invention, but it is an actual product almost? ready for the market.
 
minimax said:
One recent innovation from Philips Design were pillows on which you could SMS messages. The light's were directly woven into the fabric, you couldnt see them. So you would sit on your couch tres relaxed when your pillow starts flashing beneath you.
Click to expand...

What happened if you drooled on the pillow? Or washed it?
 
The V&A Museum in London recently hosted a 'Touch in Design' exhibition where they had several prototype pieces some of which played on light. They had a bed which you could draw on with a finger and a beam of light would appear on the cloth for a short period.

They also had a few new methods to send/receive SMS although some of them were some unintuitive that most people walked away from the exhibit rather than stay and experiment.
 
Saw a TV show about a month ago that talked about the using LED's to light a home. In one part of the section they took a kids cooking oven and replaced the regular bulb with several LED's. The oven w/LED's did not cook the little cake faster than the one with a regular bulb. Anyway, I thought that using LED's is a very promising idea and a good way to save money as long as you are comfortable with their light output.
 
Royal Philips and their labs are absolutely the trend-setters for this type of technology. Presently I'm using mostly Reveal incandescent bulbs, I'm really anal about white light, and fluorescent is too green-cast for me (plus, i see flicker in just about any fluorescent light). But I did switch to fluorescent for utility lights as they last so frigging long. I've been eying LED lights for a while, and I'm considering switching to LED bulbs in all the (non halogen) lights in my apartment... but at like $27/bulb, they had better be pretty damn white, even if they do last forever.

I don't like the sound of yellow-white light from this invention, but it's still in it's early stages... Designers have been doing a lot with incorporating light into surfaces and objects... there's a revolution waiting to happen. I agree, eventually we won't have lamps, light will be a function of the architecture and furniture.
 
Very interesting!

I'm not a fan of fluorescent lights. Too dam loud! :p
 
Very neat discovery indeed.

Since it states that the light emitted would last for 50, 000 hours what happens when those 50, 0000 hours are up. How do you replace this, do you repaint the surface(s). If you electrically charge it with a laser, how do you turn it off? Or do you electrically charge the paint to turn it off and on.

I must have missed something in that article. Kinda confused on some of the details. :confused:
 
dmw007 said:
Cool discovery! What a neat accidental discovery.
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Funny how many inventions are accidentially created in the pursuit of something else.

Post-its and Ink Jet printers come to mind.

This one sounds really cool and would save energy as well. Awesome!

Sushi
 
maya said:
Very neat discovery indeed.

Since it states that the light emitted would last for 50, 000 hours what happens when those 50, 0000 hours are up. How do you replace this, do you repaint the surface(s). If you electrically charge it with a laser, how do you turn it off? Or do you electrically charge the paint to turn it off and on.

I must have missed something in that article. Kinda confused on some of the details. :confused:
Click to expand...
50,000 hours = 5.7 years, not that I want to redecorate every 5 years but it brings a whole new dimension to "how many Australians does it take to change a bulb".
 
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