News

12 February 2009

 

UK funding for Cambridge-UCSB GaN LED lighting & PV development

Research Councils UK (RCUK) has announced £12m of new funding for the expanded Science Bridge Awards scheme.

The first Science Bridges awards were funded by the UK Government in 2006 to support existing collaborations between the UK and USA by taking research results towards commercialization and undertaking proof-of-concept studies.

The latest funding is designed to foster research collaborations between 16 UK universities and leading academic and industrial institutions in not only the USA but also the emerging super-economies of China and India.

The ten RCUK Science Bridges awards approved this year include a £1.48m award over three years (from 1 March) for a project ‘Harnessing Materials for Energy’ between the University of Cambridge and University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). Colin Humphreys (professor of Materials Science at Cambridge) is principal investigator and professors Tony Cheetham (UCSB), Sir Richard Friend and Ian White as well as Dr V Deshpande (Cambridge) are other investigators.

The aim is to progress existing research in the field of energy-related materials (from existing collaboration between Cambridge and UCSB) through to prototype products and devices.

The multi-faceted collaboration involves developing new prototype products and devices including:

• high-efficiency organic and inorganic solar cells, including multi-layer stacks based on GaN/InGaN/Si for concentrating photovoltaic systems (with the GaN layer absorbing the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, the InGaN layer the blue and green, and the silicon layer the yellow, red and near-infrared, giving a theoretical efficiency of more than 60%).

• gallium nitride (GaN) white LEDs grown on 6-inch silicon wafers (instead of 2-inch sapphire wafers) in order to reduce costs by a factor of 10 for lighting applications (as well as researching ways to increase luminous efficiency) - Cambridge will grow the LED structures and UCSB will process them into lamps;

• novel phosphors with better color rendering for more natural-looking solid-state lighting, so that skin tones, the colour of clothes etc, look the same indoors and out (compared with existing blue LEDs coated with a yellow phosphor, which gives poor-quality cold-white artificial light that may be detrimental to health);

• organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) for large-area applications in both displays and lighting; and

• the low-cost integration of both LEDs and OLEDs onto printed circuit boards, reducing the cost of using LEDs and OLEDs; and

• ultralight cellular materials and structures (like a honeycomb or 3D lattice) using both polymers and metals as well as composites (aiming to save energy when used in transportation systems such as cars, buses, lorries, trains and planes).

RCUK funding for the projects is being boosted by additional backing from the three partner countries involved, provided by the Indian Department of Science and Technology, the FCO Science and Innovation Network in the USA, and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in China.

“By working with international partners we can benefit from their expertise and get more value from our investment in the UK's world class research community,” says Lord Drayson, Minister of State for Science and Innovation. “The RCUK Science Bridges Awards are an excellent example of how the UK is encouraging research which has both strong international collaborations and close links with business,” he adds.

“The UK already participates in a huge amount of collaborative research globally, and we hope UK businesses and the wider global community will reap the economic and environmental benefits arising from these research partnerships,” comments RCUK’s chair, professor Ian Diamond.

See related items:

PhotonStar and Cambridge win UK funding for £1m LED lighting R&D program

UK government grants £3m to develop GaN LEDs on 6” silicon for low-cost solid-state lighting

Search: GaN LEDs PV

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