Microprinting Waveguides for Ultra-thin and Flexible LED Lighting Panels

Inorganic LEDs are on course to replace the traditional incandescent and fluorescent lights in general lighting. However, lighting luminaires employing LEDs are bulky structures that are lacking thin and flexible forms. This severely limits the design options, further cost reduction, and broader adoption of solid-state lighting. While organic LEDs (OLEDs) can be formed on flexible substrates, OLED lighting which lags behind LED in cost, performance and scale. With the help of prior DOE SBIR funding, Lucent Optics has developed a new technology platform (which is currently being commercialized under the CoreGLO™ trademark) for making wide-area lighting panels using off-the-shelf inorganics LEDs and inexpensive flexible plastic sheets. CoreGLO panels distribute the LED light with high efficiency and without glare while featuring an ultra-thin and flexible form factor and low manufacturing cost. The proposed project will develop and demonstrate an advanced additive manufacturing technique, called “microprinting”, which would enable making large-area, high-performance CoreGLO panels using extremely small amounts of raw materials and embedded energy compared to traditional luminaire manufacturing techniques. Microprinting converts any optically transparent sheet-form substrate into an optical waveguide which can be used directly in the CoreGLO panels without the need of any further processing. Lucent Optics has demonstrated prototypes of thin and flexible wide-area lighting luminaires employing microprinted waveguides with sizes up to 2’x2’, luminaire-level optical efficiencies of up to 87% and wall-plug efficacies of up to 121 lm/W, which is twice the efficacy of flexible OLEDs. Further development of microprinting technology is needed to scale CoreGLO panels to the sizes of mainstream linear luminaires (4’ and above) and enable high-CRI versions of the panels. In Phase I, we will conduct a feasibility study of using the microprinting technology for making high-performance waveguides for CoreGLO panels in sizes above 2’x2’ and with high color rendering (90 CRI), develop a functional pilot prototype and evaluate its performance. With the subsequent product development in Phase II and commercialization in Phase III, we will make viable creating a wide array of ultra-low-cost LED-based luminaires having innovative shapes and attractive designs.