NEWLED aims to develop warm-white LEDs emitting at higher than 200 lm/W

Dundee, Scotland--The University of Dundee is leading a 11.8 million Euro project, called NEWLED, that aims to develop a new generation of white LEDs with an overall luminous efficacy of at least 200 lm/W, twice that of today's LEDs.

"Common lightbulbs have a pretty low efficiency rating and even the best current white LEDs in use only have an overall efficiency of around 25%," says professor Edik Rafailov, NEWLED project leader. "What we are aiming to develop is a significantly more efficient white LED, which would be around 50% to 60% efficient. If we can do that and it becomes widely adopted, then the effects on energy consumption would be enormous. It would also produce lighting over which much more control could be exercised in brightness and tone."

NEWLED hopes to develop phosphor-free structures to replace the blue-LED-plus-yellow-phosphor type of white-light emitter that makes up the vast majority of white LEDs being sold today. One way NEWLED will approach this is to boost the efficiency of yellow indium gallium aluminum phosphide/aluminum gallium arsenide (InGaAlP/AlGaAs) LEDs by bandgap-engineered superlattices, combining the yellow LEDs with gallium nitride (GaN)-based blue LEDs. The project will also work on better light-extraction methods for LEDs.

Related: HgTe-HgCdTe superlattice photodetector has high response in LWIR

Related: Coating that mimics firefly scales makes LEDs more efficient

Related: Photonic-crystal LED reaches 73% light-extraction efficiency

Related: Rensselaer researchers increase green LED output with nanoscale pattern

The project started in November, 2012 and will end by November, 2016. Forecast project cost and project funding are 11,760,277 and 8,400,000 Euros, respectively.

The other participants in NEWLED are:

--University of Rome Tor Vergata (Rome, Italy)
--Technische Universität Berlin (Berlin, Germany)
--TopGaN (Warsaw, Poland)
--Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris, France)
--M-Squared Lasers (Glasgow, Scotland)
--Osram Opto Semiconductors (Regensburg, Germany)
--VI Systems (Berlin, Germany)
--Compound Semiconductor Technologies (Glasgow, Scotland)
--Vilnius University (Vilnius, Lithuania)
--Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg, Russia)
--Soft-Impact (St. Petersburg, Russia)
--LUX-TSI (Pencoed, Wales)
--TTY-Säätiö (Tampere, Finland)

Sources:

http://cordis.europa.eu/search/index.cfm?fuseaction=proj.document&PJ_RCN=13100600

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/pressreleases/2013/february13/newled.htm