Homes across the world could be fitted with ‘light-emitting wallpaper’ and negate the need for light bulbs as soon as 2012.
This is the hope of the Carbon Trust, which is backing new organic LED (OLED) lighting technology that promises major carbon cuts.
LOMOX, the company developing the ultra-efficient OLED lighting technology, has been awarded a £454,000 grant by the Carbon Trust.
It is claimed the OLED materials have a wide variety of potential applications and when coated onto a film could be used to cover walls, creating light-emitting wallpaper that removes the need for traditional light bulbs.
While operating lifetime has traditionally been a problem with OLED technology, LOMOX claims to have found a way to achieve significantly longer lifetimes than fluorescent lamps. The company also said the technology will be more efficient (producing 150 lumens/W) as it only emits light along one axis. It is believed that OLEDs can produce a more natural-looking light than other forms of lighting.
The Carbon Trust has announced that it is looking for other technologies with significant carbon-saving potential to receive up to £500,000 of grant funding through its Applied Research scheme. It recently launched an open call for applications, which will close on 18 February 2010.
The grant scheme has so far supported 164 projects from around 1,900 applications and committed a total of £23m towards research worth around £55m.
According to the Carbon Trust, approximately 65 per cent of completed projects have, or are in the process of generating new patents, making commercial sales or receiving further investment into the development of the technology.
Electronic wallpaper as a simple replacement for point source lighting probably won’t work. Simple exercise – take a projector and put a blank page of white (or red or yellow or blue or…) light onto any wall or ceiling you like, with the conventional lights turned off. That’s “electronic wallpaper” as Carbon Trust see it. It’s rubbish! It looks awful! No-one would buy it! However, if you combine science with art and create a pattern of light, changeable perhaps with mood / temperature / season / time of night etc, that will work, and early examples (not in OLED) are already available.
Also, alleged claims of being able to achieve 150 lumens/Watt from OLED materials in the future are unrealistic at the present time, and harm the real world progress being made by small molecule and polymer OLED makers.
It would be good if your reports included an element of “real world” analysis by your staff reporters commenting on the contents of the story!
wasn’t it said that the computer was rubbish and would never catch on?
Organic LED technology may be vialble in reverse as a means of electricity generation? There is research coating window glass panels to produce “Titania Dye Sensitized Cells” which use titanium dioxide as the substrate in place of silicon. TDS cells use 2 transparent sheets of glass with conductive coatings and an electrolyte sandwiched between, thus allowing them to be used as a window, (A heavily tinted one! – there is similar development in sun-glasses too.) They are at present producing electricity commercially at about 10% efficiency and produce about 50 watts per square metre. It is good to see thinking outside the box!
this “light-emitting wallpaper” is an excellent idea but getting in everyones homes seems expenseive, what is the cost of this stuff.
Difficult to believe that an electronic wall paper would replace conventional light bulb in a room but who knows , it may become a realty in future with the ever advancing technology in every walk of life.
LIGHT EMITTING WALLPAPER LOOKS TO BE A GREAT IDEA.
HOW DO YOU TURN IT ON OR OFF?
Jim, reckon a switch would be the best thing!
Uplighters throw light onto a wall where it is reflected and this can look quite good for certain applications. Or imagine a white ceiling without the central light bulb or maybe even a white room on a cloudy day. Whether they can produce 150lumen/W OLED’s cost effectively is the big question. It may take 10 years rather than 2, but the concept probably seems as outlandish now as aluminium foil would have seemed to people at the beginning of the 1900’s.
no good for me! i hate hanging wall paper so just paint the walls. any body about to do light emitting paint