MNTL and ECE associate professor Can Bayram received a prestigious ARPA-E OPEN grant to support his development of novel green LED lights that, among other benefits, will be able to generate the same human-perceived level of brightness as today’s blue LED lamps, but with significantly less energy consumption and associated carbon emissions. They will also avoid the health concerns associated with today’s LEDs.
The new project’s goal is to enable a “true” white light LED, which might have triple the efficiency of today’s LED light. This true white light would be achieved through the means of color-mixed lights that include red and blue LED components plus the green LED that Bayram will develop.
“With our technology, hopefully in three years, we will close the gap between having high-efficiency, unhealthy light versus low-efficiency, healthy light,” he says. “So hopefully we will push this up so that we can all have both energy savings and environmental savings, as well as health benefits.”