Walls of OLED Light goes green with graphene

Many say that technology is the way to the green future and I cannot disagree that a part of the solution will be technology breakthroughs that either helps reducing our energy consumption or finding new renewable sources.

One big part of our consumption comes from our need of of lighting up our homes and this area is filled with innovation and therefore makes it extra interesting to follow.

A very interesting article in ACS Nano February 4:th show that by using graphene there will be possible to make OLED light emitters completely without metal.

So why is this interesting from a green perspective?

OLED, Organic light emitting diode is a plastic material that is considered to be a part the next generation of TV:s because it can generate light in a very thin matrix of pixels. It means that every pixel on the TV is an individual plastic light bulb instead of todays solution with a big lamp behind a LCD matrix trying to block the light to reach the viewer. It gives an extremely sharp image with rich colors and very low energy consumption. One downside though with this technology is that it cannot be produced entirely organic because of a transparent electrode layer called ITO has been the only solution seen so far to drive the organic light bulbs. ITO is a metallic Indium Tin Oxide layer that is not very green because of the rare Indium metal.












Graphene: If you take one atomic layer of Graphite you get Graphene which is one of the most housed new nanotech materials of the last decade. It is defined as a single-atom-thick hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms and is very popular to its electrical ability of electron mobility 100 times greater than silicon. It’s mechanical abilities, its potentially very cheap reproducibility and its transparency makes it ideal as electrodes also in light emitting applications.

OLED combined with Graphene leads to the new invention described in ACS Nano, where the metallic electrodes called ITO (Indium Tin Oxide), that drives the plastic light bulbs in the OLED TV can now be exchanged to graphene and then the manufacturing complicated ITO layer can be exchanged by something that can be put on a roll and being pressed to sheets like a daily magazine.

In the long run this can become light emitting plastic wall paper or any other creative ideas you can come up with if you get light emitting flexible paper sheets.

The big green bonus except for the low energy consumption is that that it is all organic and can be fully recycled.