OLLA Project Demonstrates Efficient, White-OLED Lighting

The European OLLA Project has delivered its final milestone, having demonstrated an efficient, white-OLED lighting tile. OLLA reports it has demonstrated an efficacy of 50.7 lumens per watt and an initial brightness of 1,000 cd/sq.m, based on Novaled (Dresden, Germany) OLED-technology.

The OLLA Project is a joint, basic-research consortium, headed by Philips Lighting GmbH (Aachen, Germany). Industrial partners include Philips Research (Aachen, Germany), Novaled AG, Osram Opto Semiconductors GmbH (Regensburg, Germany), Siemens AG (Erlangen, Germany), Merck KGaA (Frankfurt, Germany), Aixtron AG (Aachen, Germany), H.C. Starck GmbH (Germany) and Sensient Imaging Technologies GmbH (Wolfen, Germany). Twenty-four partners of eight European countries have been working together to develop white-OLED technology for lighting purposes with the goal to reach a 50 lm/W efficacy with a lifetime of more than 10,000 hours at 1,000 cd/sq.m. initial brightness.

“Peter Visser, project manager of the OLLA Project, Philips Lighting, said, “The high efficiency, combined with the extrapolated lifetime values, prove that OLED is a serious technology for lighting applications, allowing innovative design capabilities and energy savings for future lighting products. It’s a very important step toward the introduction of OLED technology in the lighting market.”

Novaled’s Dr. Martin Vehse added, “The Novaled PIN technology has the potential to further improve the power efficiency. It’s in line with the technology roadmap that, in the near future, some 100 lm/W OLEDs will be achievable.”

“Collecting all light of the device in a laboratory setup with a macro extractor, we measure even more than 80 lm/W,” Dr. Volker van Elsbergen, Philips Research, said. “This shows that one of the keys to higher efficiencies will be better light outcoupling technologies.”

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Besides these reported values, the OLLA Project delivered the first large-sized OLEDs, free of tin-doped indium oxide; the first, large-area printed OLEDs; and several ICT demonstrators. Philips, Osram Opto Semicondcutors, Siemens, Novaled and Fraunhofer IPMS will continue the development of OLED lighting technology in a followup project. Within this new, OLED100.eu (the overarching project that aims to develop the technologies necessary to form the basis for efficient OLED applications in the general, European lighting industry project), OLED efficiency, lifetime and size will increase.