Bright Lights, Big Innovations
By: Allison Elliott
John Anthony wants to light up your life - with organic solar cells, solid-state lighting and flexible LCD screens. Anthony, Hubbard Professor of Chemistry in the UK College of Arts and Sciences, devotes his research efforts to developing new energy technologies that may soon find their way into your everyday environment.
Most people are familiar with the basic ideas behind Anthony's work. LED lighting and solar panels are showing up with increasing frequency in "green" buildings. But the current lighting methods have a few issues. It's hard to get a good white light balance from LEDs (think about the bright blue glow of LED holiday lights), and solar panels are expensive and difficult to manufacture in an environmentally-friendly manner. Anthony is working on solutions to these problems.
Anthony's lab creates solid state lighting units that are both more energy efficient than conventional light bulbs, and safer for the environment than mercury-containing compact fluorescents. At this point the solid state lights can produce bright light; Anthony is now busy calibrating the units to produce a clear, pleasant glow.
Ideally, these solid state lights could be powered by another of the innovations from Anthony's lab -- spray-on solar cells. The aerosolized material converts almost any surface into a solar cell capable of taking in energy from natural or artificial light. The spray-on material has a limited lifespan of a few days, but is cheap and environmentally friendly to produce. Made from petroleum by-products and other compounds already in existence, the solar cell material can be sprayed onto a paper or canvas backing, rolled into scroll, and unfurled as needed to soak up solar energy. When the roll of solar cell material has been exhausted, the entire product can be recycled. Even given the temporary nature of the spray-on solar cell compound, solar panels made in this way would ultimately consume fewer resources than conventional solar panels.
The U.S. military has already tested the spray-on solar cell material to charge electronic devices in the field. The material could also be used by disaster response teams to power emergency communications devices, or even by office workers who want to charge their cell phones under their desk lamps.
Outside of the lab, Anthony is an entrepreneur, marketing his innovations as the CEO of Outrider Technologies, LLC. Housed in the UK Advanced Science and Technology Commercialization Center (ASTeCC), Outrider Technologies partners with major government and industry groups.
Outrider is supplying materials to a number of high-profile research projects in Europe, Asia and the U.S. One recent demonstration by Japanese electronics giant Sony used Anthony/Outrider materials to make a flexible display entirely by inkjet printing on a plastic sheet. The inexpensive displays can be used as "e-paper" for digital magazines, or in commercial settings such as large retail stores. By using small shelf-mounted flexible displays as price tags, retail managers could change prices on every item in a store with the touch of a button. Flexible displays also offer opportunities for personal communications devices and industrial use.
The next time you flip on a light switch, encounter a solar panel or see a digital display, think about how research at the University of Kentucky may change these objects in the future - bringing greener, smarter technologies into your everyday life.
