OSRAM is presenting a new luminaire (called the Rollercoaster) that features transparent OLED panels. OSRAM says that they have made some significant advances and they now plan to start series-production of such panels in 2014.
The Rollercoaster looks like a glass and metal sculpture when turned-off and has a mobius-form (and so looks like a rollercoaster). It has 30 rectangular OLED panels, each with an active area of 18x6.5 cm. The OLEDs feature an efficiency of 20 lm /W and a transparency of 57% (which they say is the highest yet for such large panels. Fraunhofer's TABOLA transparent panels, which we reviewed back in April feature 45% transparency).
The transparent panels were produced at OSRAM's pilot line at Regensburg and were developed as part of the TOPAS project. This is a bit strange as TOPAS uses phosphorescent OLEDs, and so we would have assumed they'd be more efficient (more on this below). The German government has initiated a follow-up project in 2010 (which will run till September 2013) called GENESIS that aims to scale down to manufacture-compliant processes and substrate sizes. The current panels use glass substrates made by Saint-Gobain (based on the new Silverduct technology, and these enable lower cost production compared to earlier processes).
OSRAM currently offers square (119x119 mm) Orbeos SDW-058 panels, their second-gen panels which feature 40 lm/W (up from around 25 lm/W in the first generation, and 20 lm/W on those transparent panels).
