LED Wind Turbine Light

Windmills have inspired Mathmos to come up with Wind turbine LED lights, and you can use these lights in your gardens or inside your own room for your personal leisure.

Wind turbines are the best eco-friendly sources of energy and in this day and age we definitely need more alternative, reliable and long lasting sources of energy. These lights function based on the same principle of windmills, and they light up as you blow on them.

So you can now enjoy a relaxed breezy evening and a nice dinner in your garden lit up with these LED lights for only $14.99 at ThinkGeek.com. They are also small enough to be mounted on your bedroom window too, if you fancy that! Some other eco-friendly lights and lamps that you can look at are the Spray Can lighting and Spark green energy lamp.

Sure! It is really cool. What is the application of this LED? I think it will be not widely used in our life but the idea is helpful to our future design.

Fascinating New Generation OLEDs

With their minuscule energy consumption and 20-year life expectancy, LED light bulbs have grabbed the consumer’s imagination.

But an even newer technology is intriguing the world’s lighting designers: OLEDs, or organic light-emitting diodes, create long-lasting, highly efficient illumination in a wide range of colors, just like their inorganic LED cousins. But unlike LEDs, which provide points of light like standard incandescent bulbs, OLEDs create uniform, diffuse light across ultrathin sheets of material that eventually can even be made to be flexible.

Ingo Maurer, who has designed chandeliers of shattered plates and light bulbs with bird wings, is using 10 OLED panels in a table lamp in the shape of a tree. The first of its kind, it sells for about $10,000.

He is thinking of other uses. “If you make a wall divider with OLED panels, it can be extremely decorative. I would combine it with point light sources,” he said.

Other designers have thought about putting them in ceiling tiles or in Venetian blinds, so that after dusk a room looks as if sunshine is still streaming in.

Today, OLEDs are used in a few cellphones, like the Impression from Samsung, and for small, expensive, ultrathin TVs from Sony and soon from LG. (Sony’s only OLED television, with an 11-inch screen, costs $2,500.) OLED displays produce a high-resolution picture with wider viewing angles than LCD screens.

In 2008, seven million of the one billion cellphones sold worldwide used OLED screens, according to Jennifer Colegrove, a DisplaySearch analyst. She predicts that next year, that number will jump more than sevenfold, to 50 million phones.

But OLED lighting may be the most promising market. Within a year, manufacturers expect to sell the first OLED sheets that one day will illuminate large residential and commercial spaces. Eventually they will be as energy efficient and long-lasting as LED bulbs, they say.

Because of the diffuse, even light that OLEDs emit, they will supplement, rather than replace, other energy-efficient technologies, like LED, compact fluorescent and advanced incandescent bulbs that create light from a single small point.

Its use may be limited at first, designers say, and not just because of its high price. “OLED lighting is even and monotonous,” said Mr. Maurer, a lighting designer with studios in Munich and New York. “It has no drama; it misses the spiritual side.”

“OLED lighting is almost unreal,” said Hannes Koch, a founder of rAndom International in London, a product design firm. “It will change the quality of light in public and private spaces.”

Mr. Koch’s firm was recently commissioned by Philips to create a prototype wall of OLED light, whose sections light up in response to movement.

Because OLED panels could be flexible, lighting companies are imagining sheets of lighting material wrapped around columns. (General Electric created an OLED-wrapped Christmas tree as an experiment.) OLED can also be incorporated into glass windows; nearly transparent when the light is off, the glass would become opaque when illuminated.

Because OLED panels are just 0.07 of an inch thick and give off virtually no heat when lighted, one day architects will no longer need to leave space in ceilings for deep lighting fixtures, just as homeowners do not need a deep armoire for their television now that flat-panel TVs are common.

The new technology is being developed by major lighting companies like G.E., Konica Minolta, Osram Sylvania, Philips and Universal Display.

“We’re putting significant financial resources into OLED development,” said Dieter Bertram, general manager for Philips’s OLED lighting group. Philips recently stepped up its investment in this area with the world’s first production line for OLED lighting, in Aachen, Germany.

Universal Display, a company started 15 years ago that develops and licenses OLED technologies, has received about $10 million in government grants over the last five years for OLED development, said Joel Chaddock, a technical project manager for solid state lighting in the Energy Department.

Armstrong World Industries and the Energy Department collaborated with Universal Display to develop thin ceiling tiles that are cool to the touch while producing pleasing white light that can be dimmed like standard incandescent bulbs. With a recently awarded $1.65 million government contract, Universal is now creating sheetlike undercabinet lights.

“The government’s role is to keep the focus on energy efficiency,” Mr. Chaddock said. “Without government input, people would settle for the neater aspects of the technology.”

G.E. is developing a roll-to-roll manufacturing process, similar to the way photo film and food packaging are created; it expects to offer OLED lighting sheets as early as the end of next year.

“We think that a flexible product is the way to go,” said Anil Duggal, head of G.E.’s 30-person OLED development team. OLED is one of G.E.’s top research priorities; the company is spending more than half its research and development budget for lighting on OLED.

Exploiting the flexible nature of OLED technology, Universal Display has developed prototype displays for the United States military, including a pen with a built-in screen that can roll in and out of the barrel.

The company has also supplied the Air Force with a flexible, wearable tablet that includes GPS technology and video conferencing capabilities.

As production increases and the price inevitably drops, OLED will eventually find wider use, its proponents believe, in cars, homes and businesses.

“I want to get the price down to $6 for an OLED device that gives off the same amount of light as a standard 60-watt bulb,” said Mr. Duggal of G.E. “Then, we’ll be competitive.”

Tiny Carrying LED Projector for Laptop

Do you want a big video picture but without the big bucks for a big screen? Here I introduce BenQ Joybee GP1 mini projector to you. The $500 1.4-pound pico projector uses a 20,000-hour LED lamp for illumination, and includes a USB port. Put your media (movies, photos, business presentations) on a thumb drive and you can leave your laptop at home.

The tiny unit comes with a carrying case, but you have to carry the separate, equally sized power supply by itself. Fortunately, the GP1 really can be set up without reading a manual. It took me about five minutes to connect the cords and figure out the commands on the wafer-sized remote.

You can connect a camcorder, DVD player, TV, video game console or — with an extra-cost dock — an iPod to the Joybee. But if you want to watch videos, you first must convert your files into the AVI format, using the included Mac and Windows software.

The company claims that the projector can create an image up to 80 inches in diameter, but don’t expect that size during the day. Even in a dimly lighted room, the weak light output meant that I had to put the unit quite close to the wall to see a bright-enough image.

As a pico projector, the Joybee lacks an optical zoom, which means you have to move the entire unit to change the picture size. That may not be practical in a business setting, but if you’re planning on watching a movie in your hotel room with all the lights out, it may not be a big deal. Once set up, the colors were well-saturated, with acceptable black levels.

The menus are intuitive and the remote works well, but the on-unit touch controls were erratic, often not responding to multiple hard presses and then jumping into action with a very light tap.

So it is a low-cost way to get a big picture in a dark room, won’t rely on this projector for your PowerPoint presentations.

Tiny LED Serve in Automobile

It is reported that a tiny new LED power source could serve in applications ranging from automotive interiors to architectural fixtures to television backlights.

The device, measuring a scant 3.5 x 3.5 x 1.2 mm, could carve out a special niche for itself in hybrid vehicles and electric cars, where packaging is tight and power budgets are tighter, its manufacturer says.

“Due to its small size, you can put just one or two of them in an appliance and there’s still plenty of light,” says Rodney Bailey, vice president of optoelectronic components for TT electronics OPTEK Technology, maker of the new power source. “It’s attractive for electric hybrids because those vehicles need to use the bare minimum of current.”

Known as the OVS5MxBCR4 Series LED package, the new product dissipates a half a Watt of power, but is approximately half the size of other half-Watt power sources. Moreover, its low power-draw means it needs no thermal management, Optek engineers say.

“There’s not enough power coming out of it to merit thermal management,” Bailey says.

Optek is positioning the device in a “sweet spot” between 1W packages – which draw twice as much power and need thermal management – and very small devices that don’t offer sufficient light intensity for many interior applications. The company says the device is already been designed into several forthcoming hybrid electric vehicle programs for interior lighting applications. There, the low power requirements are making it an attractive alternative to incandescent bulbs, which can draw as much as 6A. In contrast, the OVS5MxBCR4 Series LED package uses about one-tenth of that. The use of the device in such applications is consistent with a trend toward growing use of LEDs in the auto industry.

Optek says power dissipation for the device at 150 mA is 0.48W for white, warm white and blue LEDs, 0.51W for a green deice and 0.33W for red, amber and yellow packages. Luminous flux for white, warm white, blue and green LEDs is 25, 25, 6 and 25 lm, respectively.

Applications include automotive interiors and exteriors, architectural indoor and outdoor lighting, mobile appliances and display backlighting, especially in televisions.

As the time goes by, the tiny LED should be popular in applications where they need good light.

Philips Find Ways to Closes Yellow LED Gap

The yellow light-emitting diode (LED) gap always trouble Philips till now. Recently, researchers with Philips Lumileds (San Jose, CA) have developed a monochromatic nitride diode to closes the gap. The phosphor-converted (PC) amber LED demonstrated by Regina Mueller-Mach and her colleagues uses the down-conversion of blue light from an indium-gallium-nitride (InGaN) LED to longer-wavelength light by a phosphor, in a variation of a well-established process for producing cold or warm white light from blue LED light (see also “Fluorescent microspheres create white-light LEDs”).

Monochromatic light-emitting diodes cover a large part of the visible spectrum with high efficiency. For blue light, nitride diodes achieve external quantum efficiencies in excess of 65%. For red light, phosphor diodes achieve efficiencies of approximately 50%. However, so far no highly efficient monochromatic LEDs have been available for the “yellow gap” at around 560 nm.

Leveraging previous research on warm white light, the researchers succeeded in down-converting blue LED light into monochromatic amber light with a 595 nm wavelength and a color purity of 98.7%. The external quantum efficiency of the PC amber LED is at 30-40%, depending on temperature. Compared to direct amber LEDs, the new PC amber LED is two to five times as bright. It achieves a light output of 70 lumens at a 350 mA current.

There are numerous applications for the LUXEON Rebel PC Amber LED. It can be used in yellow traffic lights or signals as well as in cars’ turn signals or warning lights for construction sites. They could also be used in consumer electronics and their high efficiency makes them inexpensive.