Environmental issues - Page 2

Excessive exposure to blue light has been linked to many health issues - including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and insomnia. Children, especially, have delicate retinas that are highly susceptible to the dangers of blue light.

Researchers from Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University, led by Prof. J.H. Jou, have been advocates of candle-light OLED lighting for a long time, as part of their fight against the hazards of LEDs and white light. In 2015, the researchers published a call out to consumers to be aware of the hazards of LEDs and to governments to enact new rules to enforce light-based products to show the light spectrum.

The Fraunhofer Institute is working on alternative light sources for photo therapy, and Flexible OLED technology is prime candidate because it is light weight, can be flexed and does not produce almost any heat (unlike LED-based lighting).

Before flexible OLEDs are actually used in such treatment, though, it is important to know if OLEDs carry any potential toxic risks. The Fraunhofer FEP performed an initial study on in vitro cell cultures afflicted by defined damage. The researchers used flexible 10x10 cm green OLEDs, and found that the OLEDs positively stimulated the damaged cells, as expected. The tests showed now cytotoxity in the material systems, including when the OLEDs were bent (this increases the chance of material leakage from the OLEDs).

Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University is continuing its fight against the hazards of LEDs and white light - a research team from NTHU published a call to the public to think carefully about television, computer, phone, tablet and other LED-based display usage as the white light produced by LEDs can be hazardous.

The researchers say that people should consider new candle-light style lighting sources for reading, residence and street light. They also urge governments and legislators to enact new rules that will force light-based products to show the light spectrum emitted by the product.

Earlier this month, we reported that Taiwan's WiseChip is entering the OLED lighting market with plans to produce candle-light emitting OLEDs using technology developed at Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University.

Wisechip already started to produce sample panels, and the first ones were setup in an aboriginal village as street lights - embedded inside a bee-hive like mask taken from rotten wood. This tribe, Tai-Yah (also called Atayal), has been without electricty until 1979 (they were known as the "dark tribe"), and currently the use CFL street lights, but rejected a suggestion by the government to install LED lights.

An LG Display researcher revealed that the company is developing a roll-to-roll process to produce flexible OLED displays. LG says this will enable them to make very flexible displays and reduce production costs.

LG Display also seeks to replace the aluminum electrodes with copper ones. This will again decrease costs and will also enable higher-resolution displays. There are some concerns with copper electrodes over environmental hazards but LGD apparently resolved those issues.

A team of researchers from North Carolina State University have launched a new crowd funding project at Experiment.com, trying to raise a small amount of money ($400 to $800) to begin a new research that potentially may have implications for OLED applications, as they may enable simple and environmentally friendly OLED emitters.

The researchers developed a new method to form carbon-carbon bonds, which include the formation of spirocyclic carbon centers. Those kinds of molecules have been shown by others to be potentially useful as OLED materials but are difficult to synthesize in bulk, and this research hopes to solve this issue.

Researchers from TU Dresden and Fraunhofer COMEDD are developing OLED lighting based bio-reactors that will be used to cultivate micro-algea that will help absorb CO₂ using photosynthesis.

Those micro algae (or phototropic microorganisms) can transform carbon dioxide (CO₂) into useful products such as proteins, dyes and other substances. OLED lighting may prove to enable a more effective process by providing the necessary lighting energy.

The Fast2Light project aims to develop novel, cost-effective, high-throughput, roll-to-roll, large area deposition processes for fabricating P-OLEDs for lighting. The project also aims to minimize the potential environmental impact at this product design stage, as well as analyse in depth the repercussions throughout the life cycle, including the end of useful life stage.

Spain's Gaiker-I4K announced a research activity as part of Fast2Light that will study the identification, development and adaptation of innovative treatment processes for OLED, taking into account both mechanical and chemical recycling technologies. Gaiker-I4K will also carry out a life cycle analysis of the OLEDs developed during the project. The research will be concluded in August 2011.

Universal Display unveiled a new single-layer hybrid organic-inorganic encapsulation technology for OLED (or other thin film devices). The new technology can be used on rigid and flexible substrates and may accelerate commercialization of plastic substrates based displays.

The new technology uses environmentally-benign and non-toxic materials in a potentially low-cost process. UDC collaborated with the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University to demonstrate the technology effectiveness, and the implementation was supported by the US DoD, DoE and the National Science Foundation.

Researchers from the University of Michigan led by Jinsang Kim developed new pure-organic phosphorescence materials made primarily of inexpensive carbon, oxygen, chlorine and bromine and are "easy" to synthesize. This is the first time anyone created an phosphorescence OLED that does not contain any metals. These materials could be used to create cheaper OLEDs (as OLEDs today still need a little bit of expensive metals in them). The new materials exhibit quantum yields of 55%.

The light in those OLEDs comes from oxygen and carbon molecules called "aromatic carbonyls". These materials form strong halogen bonds with halogens in the crystal to pack the molecules tightly. This arrangement suppresses vibration and heat energy losses as the excited electrons fall back to the ground state, leading to strong phosphorescence.