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Hugely-Efficient LEDs Now Use Quantum Dots

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Quantum Dot white LED

Global warming and pollution are already impacting our lives. There are millions of deaths every year that are caused by them.

For that reason, researchers from all over the world are looking for ways to make everything around us more energy efficient and use renewable resources. By implementing these strategies, we can reduce energy usage and air pollution by multiple times.

One of the problems is electricity consumption for lighting. Most of today’s lambs are expensive or not that efficient.
The efficiency of a lamb is measured in lumens per watt. LEDs are definitely winners in this category.

However, in order to create white light with LEDs, a phosphor-based coating is added to blue LEDs. It is a very hard process since proper tuning of the color is very difficult. Therefore, lambs using this technology are more expensive and are not used widely.

Researchers from Koç University, Turkey, found a solution that will provide the effectiveness and brightness of conventional LEDs and will cost less.

They showed nanomaterial-based LEDs with a record luminous efficiency of 105 lumens per watt for this technology. They used regular blue LEDs combined with flexible lenses, filled with a solution of nano-sized semiconductor particles called quantum dots. The blue light from the LED causes the quantum dots to emit green and red, combining to create white light.

The difference of this quantum dots LED from any other LED of the same type is that the nanomaterial is incorporated in liquid form instead of solid. This allows achieving higher efficiency without a significant increase in cost.

Their LEDs can be further developed to reach an efficiency of 200 lumens per watt. Since synthesis and fabrication are easy and inexpensive, they could be produced massively. This will decrease the global electricity consumed for lighting by more than a half. It is equal to the electricity from 230 typical 500-megawatt coal plants and would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 200 million tons.

[Via EurekAlert]

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Lamb and lambs everywhere, it sure sheds a wool new light on the subject.

    I have a couple 12 V DC camping LED light bulbs, but all my other regular LED light bulbs waste a lot of heat converting 220-110V AC into the low voltage DC that each individual LED diod consumes.

    I wish houses were equipped with a separate worldwide standard low voltage DC circuit for lighting, routers, phone and computer chargers, door bells, security cameras, sensors, fans, outdoor lighting, etc.

  2. Lamb and lambs everywhere, this sure sheds a wool new light on the subject.
    Not sure what they mean with “conventional lighting” either, I’ll assume it’s conventional LED lighting, LED bulbs with less than 100 lm/W.

    I really wish houses could be equipped with a separate low voltage DC circuit for lighting, especially houses with renewable energy sources such as solar. I have a couple 12V LED light bulbs that are great, the kind you can find in campers, but the built-in transformers in all other LED light bulbs are wasting a lot of energy in heat trying to convert 220-110V AC into low voltage DC, which is what the individual LED diods consume.

    There are actually many appliances and devices that could be run on low voltage DC, basically everything that comes with its own transformer, like routers, chargers for phones and computers, as well as fans, sensors, doorbells, security cameras, outdoor lighting, etc. We just need to agree on a worldwide standard.

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