Environmental issues

Excessive exposure to blue light has been linked to many health issues (including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and insomnia). 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. We recently posted on Prof. Jou's latest research on smartphone display risks and the benefits of OLED displays.

In 2015, Taiwan's PMOLED maker WiseChip Semiconductors licensed National Tsing-Hua University's blue-light free OLED lighting technology (called Candlelight OLEDs), with an aim to mass produce these OLEDs by the end of 2017. That project faced delays, however and now NTHU announced that following a collaboration with China's OLED lighting maker First-o-lite it is now ready to commercialize its technology and NTHU demonstrated the first device to use these new panels - the OLED lighting desk-lamp you can see in the video above (and photo below).

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).

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.

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.