What is the Graphene light bulb?

Graphene Lighting LED lightbulbACThe graphene lightbulb has been the subject of a huge amount of speculation over the last few days.

What is it?

The truth is, nobody outside University of Manchester spin-out Graphene Lighting knows, so ignore anything you have heard or read.

“As a scientist, I would love to say more, but for commercial reasons I can’t,” Professor Colin Bailey told Electronics Weekly. He is a non-executive director at Graphene Lighting and deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester.

He did say it has conventional LEDs inside, and it uses “up to 10% less energy than a conventional [LED] light bulb”, said Bailey, due to some aspect of graphene, while giving away nothing to suggest if this aspect is thermal, electrical, mechanical, or something else.

As the efficacy of LED lightbulbs varies over a huge range depending on the quality of the product and how hard the LEDs are driven, it is impossible to get ‘up to 10%’ into perspective – something Bailey acknowledges.

We will have to wait six-12 months to find out, while the company gets the bulb into production and its supply chain sorted.

Not made here

Despite his best efforts, manufacture will not be in the UK because no one was willing to put up the money, said Bailey. Instead, Quebec-based Industrial Alliance has invested and “our supply chain is across the globe, but final assembly for different markets has not been finalised”.

However, Bailey intends to keep related high-tech jobs in the UK.

The Canadian stock market is likely to handle any floatation of Graphene Lighting.

Actual graphene LEDs

While the lightbulb will not have graphene light emitters, such things do exist.

Another team from Manchester has demonstrated light emission from quantum wells within ‘van der Waals heterostructures’.

Graphene is not the only 2d material. Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is a 2d insulator, and both tungsten disulphide and molybdenum disulphide are available in 2d semiconducting forms – part of a class of materials called transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). The di-selenides of both these metals are also TMDCs.

All of these materials can be flaked from solid lumps, just like graphene, and LEDs have been made by physically stacking such flakes – which align and stick together through van der Waals bonding if they are assembled in very clean conditions. The flakes are first graded by thickness to get the required final properties.

The following stack makes the TMDC into a quantum well by sandwhiching it between insulating layers and electrodes, and will emit photons if the layers are the right thickness: graphene-hBN-TMDC-hBN-graphene.

Using four quantum wells – so a repeating -hBN-TMDC-hBN-TMDC- pattern, external quantum efficiency of 8.4% has been achieved at low temperatures – a little behind OLEDs and a lot less efficient than standard LEDs, but these are early days.

This 2d LEDs work was described in a Nature Materials letter: ‘Light-emitting diodes by band-structure engineering in van der Waals heterostructures‘.

The National Graphene Institute (NGI) has been set up at the University of Manchester do develop all aspects of 2d materials. In has 200 scientists and is funded by £38m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and £23m from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). There are also currently at least 35 companies partnering with the NGI.

In 2017, the University will open the ‘Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre’ (GEIC), which will accelerate the process of bringing products to market.

 

steve bush

IBM to put $3bn into the Internet of Things

Internet of Things - IoT

Internet of Things – IoT

IBM says it will invest $3 billion over the next four years to establish an IoT (Internet of things) unit, and that it is building a cloud-based open platform to help clients and ecosystem partners across industries better integrate real-time data and insights from dispersed sources directly into business operations.

IBM’s pipwork in Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities was based on the practical applications of IoT in the enterprise and led to the development of offerings to reduce crime, minimise risk for firefighters and monitor water conditions. The company’s enterprise IoT implementations combine and analyse data from a wide variety of sources.

With new industry-specific cloud data services and developer tools, IBM will build on that expertise to integrate data from an unprecedented number of IoT and traditional sources. It will be made available on an open platform to provide industrial “makers” and “operators” with the ability to design and manufacture better connected devices and create systems that take advantage of enterprise and IoT data for business decision-making.

“Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result,” says IBM’s Bob Picciano,”this is a major focus of investment for IBM because it’s a rich and broad-based opportunity where innovation matters. Over the next decade, integration of IoT in business operations and decision-making will transform business.”

IBM estimates that 90% of all data generated by devices like smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles and appliances is never analysed or acted upon. As much as 60% of this data begins to lose value within milliseconds of being generated. To address this challenge, IBM is announcing it will offer:

IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform for Industries: New analytics services to design and deliver vertical industry IoT solutions for industry clients on the IBM Cloud, an open platform that is also available to clients and ecosystem partners looking to build their own data-driven solutions. For example, IBM will introduce a cloud-based service that helps insurance companies extract insight from connected vehicles. This will enable new, more dynamic pricing models and the delivery of services that can be highly customised to individual drivers.

IBM Bluemix IoT Zone: New IoT services as part of Bluemix platform-as-a-service will enable easy integration of IoT data into cloud-based development and deployment of IoT apps. Developers will be able to enrich existing business applications – such as enterprise asset management, facilities management, and software engineering design tools – by infusing more real-time data and embedded analytics to further automate and optimise mission critical IoT processes.

IBM IoT Ecosystem: Expansion of its ecosystem of IoT partners – from silicon and device manufacturers to industry-oriented solution providers – such as AT&T, ARM, Semtech and newly announced The Weather Company – to ensure the secure and seamless integration of data services and solutions on IBM’s open platform.

IBM’s capabilities are illustrated in a new global partnership announced today with The Weather Company – including WSI, its professional division – which provides over 2.2 billion forecasts per day around the globe, drawing from data sources that include more than 100,000 private weather sensors, aircraft and drones, as well as millions of smartphones, buildings and even moving vehicles. The two companies will help industries understand the impact of weather on business outcomes and optimise those parts of their businesses.

david manners