Patent Application
20090008573
The present invention relates to using Light Emitting Diodes for illumination.
Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are leading the way to greater efficacy as well as greater wall-plug efficiency.
Embodiments of the present invention are directed to methods and devices for converting the output of a specific color LED and generating a broader band of wavelengths of emission including not only the specific color but additional color output. Specific embodiments, as will be described below, minimize backward directed light while increasing the total range of wavelengths emitted.
This invention is described with respect to specific embodiments thereof. Additional features can be appreciated from the Figures in which:
Light emitting diodes are leading the way to greater efficacy as well as greater wallplug efficiency. For the InGaN approach, however, as more Indium is added to the GaN, overall efficiency drops steadily with increasing wavelength, as can be seen in
So even though red LEDs and blue LEDs have achieved record wall-plug efficiencies, there is a dramatically reduced efficiency for green LEDs. Green LEDs are not used to make ‘white’ light due to this lower efficiency. Instead, the practical solution has been to use a phosphor, typically Ce doped YAG deposited directly on top of the blue LED to create a kind of white lighting element as shown in
Despite the difficulties of this method, it is very successful due to its simplicity compared to for example the use of separate red, green, (the green portion of the spectrum also includes yellow light) and blue LED elements combined to make an alternative ‘white’ lamp. A warm white’ can be created with a loss of efficacy by adding a red phosphor to the yellow YAG:Ce phosphor and there are, an abundance of alternative phosphors to choose from.
A newer development that shows some promise is the development of an inexpensive solid crystal phosphor, offered by Nippon Sheet Glass and described in an article entitled “YAG glass-ceramic phosphor for white LED (I): background and development” by Fujita et al. published in connection with the Fifth International Conference on Solid State Lighting. Edited by Ferguson, Ian T. et al. in Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 5941, pp. 186-192 (2005). The back-emitted light might get through the phosphor layer more easily since the phosphor layer is no longer scattering.
There are also proposed solutions that allow both hemispheres (i.e. the full spherical emission from a layer of phosphor) to escape, such as the work of Nadarajah Narendran and others at The Lighting Research Center (at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) as mentioned in an April 2005 article entitled “Remote phosphor technique improves white LED output” published online in LEDs Magazine at: http://www.ledsmagazine.com/news/2/4/22, and detailed in a white paper entitled Improved Performance White LED, published in 2005 in the Fifth International Conference on Solid State Lighting Proceedings of SPIE and available at: http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/solidstate/pdf/narendranSPIE2005.pdf.
A dye, unlike an inorganic powder phosphor can be easily photo bleached. So that spreading a dye out, i.e., by having a larger surface area (or a larger volume) and having lower energy densities are requirements to make a dye system work. In contrast, an inorganic powder phosphor can be applied directly to the LED surface. Further, many inorganic powder phosphors are sufficiently robust to allow direct application to an intense light emitting surface (blue light and UV are more energetic also).
In an embodiment of the invention, a LED is placed at one end of a solid rectangular rod of high refractive index. All the light from the LED is captured by the input face of the rod and channeled to its output face. At the output face, a plastic or polymer sheet can be positioned that has a florescent dye embedded. The dye is preferably highly sensitive to the LED light and emits light of a longer wavelength with greater than 80% internal quantum efficiency. A dome lens or other “extracting” structure is positioned after the polymer (ideally optically coupled to it) so that the light emitted from the dyed polymer layer can escape into air in the forward hemisphere, as shown in
In contradistinction to the work of Narendran et al., in various embodiments of the invention, the back emitted light reflects from within the secondary optic (i.e., solid rod or prism) and can be redirected toward the light-conversion medium, through which it can be nearly completely transmitted. Although this same approach might be used with a powder phosphor, a sufficient layer thickness of such phosphor will not effectively allow high transmission for this redirected light and the overall efficiency will suffer badly.
With respect to
With a 1×1 mm LED size, an 8×8×8 mm prism is placed nearly touching the LED surface. At the input face is applied a mirror except for the 1×1 mm input aperture. In this case greater than 99% of the back-emitted light from the polymer is redirected to the front hemisphere and escapes as useful illumination, as illustrated in
Shrinking the rod to 5×5×5 mm dimension results in the forward efficiency decreasing by only about 1%. Many of the rays that strike the input surface at the LED aperture are of sufficiently high angle that they are totally internally reflected, so that this aperture need not be as small as possible. The manufacturing tolerances are thus reduced.
With a larger (air) spacing from the LED to the rod, a larger opening in the mirrorized front face of the rod can be considered. For a 6×6×6 mm rod with an input face having a 2×2 mm clear aperture, the efficiency of reflecting the back-emitted light (redirected forward and escaping into the dome optic) is 96%.
In an alternative embodiment of the invention, the prism can be a hollow mirror cavity. In another embodiment of the invention, a front surface mirror with air cavity between it and the polymer layer, and the mirror cavity having a hole or transparent segment such that the blue light goes through the mirror cavity.
In an embodiment of the invention, a dome lens affords a simple and low cost means of adding a fluorescent medium to an LED to change the color of the emitted radiation.
There are certain dyes that are mixed into polymers for scintillator applications that can convert blue light to green, orange and red wavelengths. These so-called Wavelength Shifting Fibers are made from dyed polystyrene, but the same dyes might also be mixed into acrylic or polyvinyltoluene or any other suitable plastic. Such dyes might also be mixed with an epoxy or silicone resin, and used as part of an optical adhesive. Furthermore, these dyes can be combined to create a yellowish output light—in any chosen ratio or concentration. By choosing the ideal concentration just 30% of the LED blue light can be absorbed and 70% converted to green and red wavelengths, thereby making a ‘white’ light or an RGB lighting system, with output spectral characteristics as desired given the dye emission spectral characteristics and the LED spectrum (and the adjusted ratio there between).
In an embodiment of the invention, a multicolor LED based lighting element includes a LED light source, wherein the LED light source emits LED light of at least a selected color, a fluorescent dye positioned to receive the LED light, wherein the LED light passing through the fluorescent dye emits fluorescent light of one or more colors other than the selected color, wherein the fluorescent light is being emitted in the forward direction and in a backward direction and an optical element positioned between the LED light source and the fluorescent dye to redirect fluorescent light emitted from the backward direction into the forward direction.
By adding the yellow-green emitted color from the dyed polymer to a pure blue LED a kind of white LED can be created. Furthermore by adding a red dye to the polymer, or by stacking a red dyed polymer on top of a green dyed polymer, a color balanced ‘white’ light system can be synthesized.
Because the dyed polymer (green in the following example) is quite transparent to the longer wavelengths (not absorbing), in an embodiment of the invention, red light can be added by means of red LEDs placed near the blue LED and emitting at least partly through the dyed layer, combining spatially with the blue LED emission and the green dye emission to get a different quality of white (it should be pointed out that any of these spectra are quite acceptable for general lighting, reading and other task lighting, and perhaps superior to a YAG:Ce phosphor based ‘white’ LED). Addition of red wavelengths would be considered desirable to improve the quality of the color rendering of the light source.
In an alternative embodiment of the invention, a lower cost rod optic is desired and TIR is not considered useful, any plastic or glass might be used and the sides coated with aluminum or silver or a dielectric mirror, so as to make this same vessel as reflective as possible. The efficiency will be somewhat reduced due to the lower effective reflectance of the mirrored surfaces (TIR is nearly perfectly reflecting but a metallic reflector will be limited to 98% (enhanced Ag or Al) and such metallic mirrors might typically reflect only 90%. Because there is no need to reflect the blue light from the LED there is less concern about the loss of reflectivity for blue wavelengths and this mirror can be made less costly, i.e. a simple aluminized coating may suffice and show reasonably high reflection for the dye emission wavelengths.
In an embodiment of the invention, a BK7 rod and dyed PMMA (nearly index matched) can obtain around 70% efficiency for the back-directed hemisphere. The front-ward directed emission is effectively emitted with 100% efficiency, except for the fresnel reflection that is endemic to the hemispheric optic. Preferably an Anti-Reflective (AR) coating is applied to the emitting surface so that the total light escaping is increased and the surface reflection is less than 1%.
Because the polymer-dyes can be chosen from those having very high internal quantum efficiency, the total system efficacy can be nearly as high as the LED wall-plug efficiency. The Stoke's deficit is the only fundamental loss. For blue light shifted to green, the Stoke's deficit is on the order of 15% of the quantity of blue that is converted, the dyestuff is otherwise highly (90%) efficient at conversion, with the blue LEDs having wall-plug efficiencies of 30 to 50%. More specifically, a blue LED may have a wall plug efficiency (WPE) of about 45%. Polymer dyes can have conversion efficiencies of about 85% for Stoke's shift (on average) and an internal quantum efficiency of more than 85%, giving a total conversion efficiency of at least 72% and a resulting overall WPE green efficiency of about 32.5%.
For 530 nm green emission, 588 lumens/watt (L/W) are generated, as calculated directly from the CIE Y value. Effective conversion (note: the calculation ignores any fresnel surface losses) can yield an ideal best case 190 L/W for the green light. In an embodiment of the invention, using just 70% of the blue to convert to green light (i.e. allowing 30% of the blue LED light to pass unabsorbed through the dye layer and polymer), and starting with a 1 W blue LED, 42 L of blue light are generated (assuming 460 nm peak) at 30%=12 L, combined with 70% of the 190 L for green, to give a final total of 145 L of combined blue and green light. Additional Red LEDs can be placed alongside the blue LED to pass through the dye layer and be mixed with the combined blue and green light to make white light. With an assumed efficiency of 40% and 300 L/W for 610 nm (red) light, the resulting efficacy for red is 120 L/W.
As a result, an RGYB system using a 0.5 W red LED along with a 1 W blue LED (overall 1.5 W) along with a yellow-green dye conversion material would generate 200 lumens of RGB (nominal white) illumination, or 133 L/W. In contrast, an incandescent light produces only 15 L/W, and a compact fluorescent produces about 50 lumens per watt (http://hes.lbl.gov/hes/makingithappen/nrr.html, last visited Jun. 30, 2008).
In another embodiment of the invention, this approach can create an effective red, green and blue (RGB) lighting element. In backlighting of an LCD for example there is a better transmission rate (i.e. higher brightness result) if the lamp is ‘peaked’ with red, green and blue wavebands so as to transmit better through the red, green and blue color filter matrix. Such an RGB lamp can be >50% more effective as a backlighting element compared to a Ce:YAG white LED and the resulting color gamut of the display system will be improved quite a bit due to this peaking at the same time. In an alternative embodiment of the invention, a pyramid shaped high index prism can be placed on top of the LED die, with a small air gap. As shown in
In
In an embodiment of the invention, a multicolor LED based lighting element, comprises a LED light source, wherein the LED light source emits LED light consisting of one or more selected color, a fluorescent dye positioned to receive the LED light, wherein the LED light passing through the fluorescent dye emits fluorescent light of one or more colors other than the selected color, wherein the fluorescent light is emitted in a forward direction and in a backward direction and an optical element positioned between the LED light source and the fluorescent dye to redirect fluorescent light from the backward direction into the forward direction. In an alternative embodiment of the invention the LED light passes through a plurality of fluorescent dyes emitting fluorescent light of one or more colors other than (i.e., in addition to) the selected color.
In an embodiment of the invention, the emitted light from a LED with a dye containing polymer coating can be directed onto an analyte. An analyte is one or more molecule or one or more atom alone or dissolved, suspended or dispersed in a medium. The analyte can be contained in a well, micro-cuvette, a micro-titer plate, a micro-array chip, a capillary, a tube, a pore, a sensor and a fluidic chip.
In an embodiment of the invention, a system for identifying a characteristic of one or more analyte comprises applying a potential to a LED to generate LED light in at least a selected color, positioning a fluorescent dye to receive the LED light, wherein the LED light passing through the fluorescent dye emits fluorescent light of one or more colors other than the selected color, wherein the fluorescent light is being emitted in the forward direction and in a backward direction, directing the forward emitted fluorescent light onto one or more analyte, wherein the one or more analyte emits light, directing the emitted light onto one or more light detector and identifying a characteristic of the one or more analyte based on the emitted light. In various embodiments of the invention, the emitted light can be detected based on one or more properties of the light emitted selected from the group consisting of fluorescence, phosphorescence, absorbance, transmittance, scattering and luminescence.
It will be appreciated that the entire visible spectrum can be covered with a handful of selected dyes.
Thus, the breadth and scope of the present invention should not be limited by any of the above-described exemplary embodiments, but should be defined only in accordance with the following claims and their equivalents.
This application claims priority to: (1) U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60/947,938, entitled: “NOVEL LED ILLUMINATION SYSTEM”, inventor: Arlie R. Conner, filed Jul. 3, 2007, which application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60947938 | Jul 2007 | US |
