INNOSYS, INC. — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 09b

Description

The significance of the problem to be addressed by this DOE SBIR project involves excessive use of electricity in consumer residential housing and commercial and industrial buildings in the United States including the negative effects the excessive and unnecessary energy has on the United States economy. The DOE’s Office of Building Technologies has determined that few emerging technologies represent as much potential to conserve energy and enhance the quality of commercial, industrial and residential building lighting than energy efficient, solid-state lighting (SSL). The DOE and the General Illumination Industry in North America have realized measurable lighting energy conservation by taking advantage of existing SSL technology. However the adoption and migration of energy efficient SSL into the remaining North American buildings will take a number of years to accomplish. SSL is inherently digital and compatible with modern electronics, sensors and control systems and can also act as a platform for Internet of Things (IOT), yet important aspects of SSL including high efficiency tunable and flexible SSL lighting that allows for new form factors to replace legacy ones still has tantalizing opportunities to explore, develop and exploit. The approach for this SBIR we propose is to perform enabling fundamental materials and architecture research to develop a family of truly flexible solid state light source that can be of any shape including ultrathin and have extremely high efficacy and be environmentally inert. One candidate approach would involve, for example, using nanoparticles including but not limited to quantum dots in newer optical silicone to make nearly lossless light deflector waveguides to channel and direct the solid state light into extremely uniform and efficient area light sources. A related approach would involve using blue light emitting diode (LED) light sources and appropriate wavelength quantum dots to down-convert the blue light into, for example, red and green wavelengths to generate appropriate white light in the range of 2200K to 6500K with high color rendering index (CRI) of greater than 90 and, for example, 95. Another approach that will be taken in this SBIR is to combine OLEDs and LEDs ultimately at the light source fabrication level to exploit the best advantages of OLEDs and LEDs. These approaches will require fundamental research efforts however we do believe that this has great potential to significantly advance SSL. This proposed research effort fits in and is aligned with the FY2019 Phase I Release 2 the need for high-efficiency wavelength conversion materials and processes on downconverters. We believe that the proposed approaches can, after fundamental research is performed, address challenges with poor thermal stability and non-uniform performance over long lifetimes, high cost to manufacture and can be readily incorporated into designs that are competitive and compatible with LED architectures that are widely used in high brightness lighting applications. The research to be completed under this SBIR effort will succeed in producing the predicted performance advancement and reduction of technical risk required to move to successive stages of research. The Phase I effort will be designed to retire significant technical risk and provide proof of principle prototypes of the proposed approaches. The primary benefit of the proposed research will be aligned with the price and performance goals described in the SSL Research and Development Plan. Given the projections for increased SSL efficacy, SSL is and will continue to be the most efficient light sources.SSL, including LEDs and OLEDs and combinations of these, has the capabilities to provide significant energy reduction resulting in, among other things, less dependence on foreign sources of energy and less wasted energy including wasted heat energy. SSL provides quality benefits for general lighting in residential and commercial applications that are not possible using fluorescent or most other types of lighting. Improved visual quality is a result of several intrinsic characteristics of SSL. Specifically optimized to enable and exploit the unique form factors and inherent flexibility and digital nature of SSLs, tremendous design flexibility is an inevitable result, thereby creating the possibility of new and innovative lighting design approaches including for fluorescent lamp replacements and architectural integration. Also SSLs enable lamps with superior color attributes. These superior color attributes include user-adjustable and selectable RGB color and high 'white light' CRI, and even color temperature tunability. The public will also greatly benefit from competitive diverse lighting sources that continue to drive cost down. SSLs not only eliminate hazardous material but also embed less energy in the manufacturing and transportation processes. These intrinsic features are expected to allow continued price reductions as SSL technology proliferates. Current fluorescent lighting technology has limitations that leave many lighting customers’ needs unmet. A reduced total-cost-of-ownership/return-on-investment that intelligent tunable SSL provide will permit customers who are concerned with energy, installation andmaintenance costs of lighting to reap the benefits compared to other legacy and emerging light source technologies including increased energy savings, higher levels of sustainability, improved lighting quality, improved efficiency, enhanced health and well-being, human centric based lighting, user-adjustable, friendly and other enhanced lighting options.