TreeHugger has a post on using graphene for energy efficient lighting – Move Over OLEDs: Scientists Create Cheap, Fully Recyclable Lighting Material.
Swedish and American researchers have just developed a fully recyclable lighting component with what Science Daily is terms a “new super material”: graphene. Graphene is both inexpensive to produce and is 100% recyclable, and could be used to create glowing wallpaper made out of plastic–much like )LEDs could. But graphene appears to improve on OLEDs in some very big ways . . .
As you know, we’ve been big fans of the very efficient, long-lasting Light Emitting Diodes and Organic LED technology. But as Science Daily notes, there are still problems:
Today’s OLEDs have two drawbacks — they are relatively expensive to produce, and the transparent electrode consists of the metal alloy indium tin oxide. The latter presents a problem because indium is both rare and expensive and moreover is complicated to recycle.
Researchers believe they’ve found a solution by creating an organic light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC) with the transparent electrode made of the “carbon material graphene.” Graphene is used instead of conventional metal electrodes–and since everything in an LEC, including the graphene, can be created from liquid solutions, they will be able to be produced through a printing process. This makes them much more efficient–and much less expensive–to create en masse than OLEDs. Researchers involved in the project say that graphene paves the way for cheap production of plastic-based lighting, perhaps for the first time.
