Commercial LED Lights: The Future Of Light
Someday, with a click, you could change the color of your walls or your house. Or maybe you would like your car to display your Twitter feed or Facebook page while you're on the road. These things may not be too far in the future, thanks to the Light-Emitting Diode (LED).
The path to what we know today to be the LED began over a century ago with H. J. Round's experiment in electroluminescence, the process behind the function powering Light-Emitting Diodes. Different voltages were observed to create different visible effects, the color of the light produced corresponding to the "energy band gap of [a] semiconductor" like gallium or galena. The first LED appeared in 1927 Russia, created by inventor Oleg Losev, but practical use would not follow for nearly 30 more years. Texas Instruments would achieve a broader audience for the LED when they beat out General Electric, RCA and IBM to file a patent for it in 1962. Texas Instruments then introduced the SNX-100, a commercial LED that, over the next two decades, would come to be used in televisions, household appliances, and digital devices like clocks, watches and calculators. This spurred innovation and by the 1990s a wide range of colors became available and that, along with increased output capability, greater efficiency and better reliability, has taken LEDs to places and created uses unimaginable a century ago.
Today residential LED lighting is available for a variety of decorative light installations, produced to fit everything from floodlights to track lighting, sconces, troffers, chandeliers or even candles. One example of the LED's adaptability is in mimicking candlelight, increasing safety while accurately preserving the mood. This improved control over the LED's light output benefits the user through efficiency which can result in a 50% reduction in energy costs, according to one study. Another advantage over incandescents comes from the smaller carbon footprint of LED light fixtures as a result of its lower heat output and longer lifespan. LEDs can also be made as small as two millimeters with no adverse effect on the clarity of the light given off. The many functions and benefits of LEDs have made these once fairly useless little lights into a ubiquitous part of modern society, seen everywhere from vehicle lights to traffic signals to personal computers, televisions, electronic billboards or barcode scanners.
In the coming century, it seems to be clear that LEDs will continue to alter and enhance our lives in even more fantastic ways. Research is currently taking place that will allow a signal to be displayed on a sheet of plastic only nanometers thick, called flexible organic light-emitting diode (FOLED), which retains clarity even when bent. With FOLEDs innovators have been able to make advances such as rollable or bendable displays which will make it possible to fold up mobile devices or video displays when not in use, for example. Branching off this concept, researchers have invented a textile-based LED which can be used to create clothing which emits light or larger displays such as Philip's "mood wall," part of their Lumalive line. LED can cycle on and off millions of times per second and there are high expectations that this capability will continue to increase high data bandwidth in the future, often called LiFi. A sign of how useful LEDs have become, NASA has plans in the future to use the technology for safe mood regulators and light sources for plant growth, making gardens aboard space stations more productive and self-sufficient.
Skipping back to the present, we can see the path to these wonders in our future. 3M is just one of the present day developers of LEDs, inventing Virtual LED, using a single LED to cover a large space for their Lightfall line of products. The bendable displays of the future have begun with products such as Osram's flexible waterproof coating which permit LEDs to be wrapped around corners and underwater. The enhanced color control through a clear polycarbonate resin in Organic Lighting Systems' LiniLED products builds on the flexible LED strip idea. Whether on your computer or your car or even yourself, LEDs are turning up more and more places and it seems like this will only grow in the future.
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