LED lighting has accomplished some great things since its introduction to the lighting market over the past few years. Sure LEDs were around before then, but the incandescent squeeze is what really prompted alternative forms of lighting to get busy and become more efficient and easy to produce. And so it happened. The low heat, petite bulb design, long life expectancy, and high efficiency of the LED light bulb has prompted for new never before imagined lighting designs.
Some of the biggest challenges lighting designers have run into while working with the LED is the color temperatures they produce. At first the LED bulb was only capable of producing a single spectrum of light color, unfortunately this intensity and color spectrum scared some people, leaving them with a bad impression of what the bulb can do.
Fortunately many developers have taken on this challenge to create a wider spectrum of colors, this includes one of the biggest challenges of them all, a warm natural white light. This has proven to be challenging because of the way that LED light is produced. Photons pass through semiconductors to meet atoms and then electrons. From there, the electron drops to a lower energy level and releases the photons. Special additives called phosphors give the LED that unique glow, the glow occurs when radiation from the LED meets the phosphor.
Two new developments are in the works to reinvent the way the phosphors react to the LED and renovate the phosphor’s components in order to achieve greater color spectrums. Scientists from the University of Georgia and Oak Ridge/Argonne national labs are working together to develop a new type of phosphor that will offer a broader spectrum of colors via their work with nanocrystals. Nanocrystals are composed of europium oxide and aluminum oxide powders. Europium offers exceptional phosphorescent qualities that may be just what the LED needs to change the color spectrum.
Another company by the name of Lumisands is also pursuing the natural light quest, with the addition of attempting to lower overall production costs. Some LEDs require rare-earth elements (phosphors) to produce light. Lumisands is working with more accessible elements, in this case sand. By using the phosphors derived from the silicone found in sand, they are able to convert some of the blue light that is emitted by the standard LED into red, green, and yellow lights.
“Manufacturers could substitute traditional rare-earth elements with our material with minimal additional steps,” said Ji Hoo, LumiSands cofounder and a UW electrical engineering doctoral student, said in a university release. “It will be cheaper, better-quality lighting for users.”For more information on these LED advancements visit: Lumisands and the University of Georgia
