White LED's on Paper (Using zinc)

Status
Not open for further replies.

MolaKule

Staff member
Joined
Jun 5, 2002
Messages
25,243
Location
Iowegia - USA
White LEDs directly on paper (from Photonics)

Imagine a white luminous curtain waving in the breeze. Or wallpaper that lights up your room with perfect white light. In his doctoral thesis, Gul Amin shows how white LEDs can be manufactured directly on paper.

Gul Amin, who recently received his doctorate at the Physical Electronics and Nanotechnology group, Campus Norrköping, shows in his thesis how it is possible to grow white LEDs, made from zinc oxide and a conducting polymer, directly on a piece of paper. He also shows how they can be printed onto wallpaper, for example - a method with a patent pending.

His research colleague, Naved ul Hassan Alvi, looked at his thesis from last summer at various methods for producing - growing - different nanostructures of zinc oxide on a number of different semiconducting materials.

Nanostructures of zinc oxide have a number of characteristics that make them suited to the manufacture of white LEDs - among them a large band gap and electrons that move easily and give off relatively large amounts of energy once they have bounced back towards the nucleus. Plus the fact that the energy is emitted as perfect white light.

Gul Amin has now gone further and succeeded in growing white LEDs directly on paper. The active components are nanothreads of zinc oxide on a thin layer of polydiethylflourene (PFO), a conducting polymer. But the paper has first been coated with a thin, water-repellent, protective and levelling layer of cyclotene, a resin.

“This is the first time anyone has been able to build electronic and photonic inorganic semiconducting components directly on paper using chemical methods,” says professor Magnus Willander, who is leading the research.

The article has been published in Wiley’s physica status solidi - Rapid Research Letters.
 
Last edited:
Very cool.
The possible applications are almost limitless.
Of course outside of specialized applications general marketability is directly related to cost.

I bought a white LED light bulb for something like 39 bucks IIRC a couple of years ago just for the novelty (and 10 year warranty I think). I don't even remember in the house I installed it!
 
Interesting. I'm going to be a bit of a devil's advocate here and mention that pumping electrical energy into a thin flammable material could lead to an interesting day. There may be a few details to work out with this concept...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom