Ultra-Thin Flexible LED Lighting Panels: A New Technology Platform for Making Wide-Area LED Luminaires

Linear fluorescent lighting fixtures, such as recessed or surface-mount troffers and suspended architectural lights, are among the most common lighting fixtures in commercial spaces, with about 1 billion installed in the United States. These fixtures also represent one of the largest opportunities for energy saving in commercial buildings. While Light-emitting diode (LED) sources are widely recognized as being much more efficient, the adoption of LEDs in linear lighting systems has been slowed by the relatively high cost of LED products and the lack of sufficiently compelling visual differentiation from the incumbent fluorescent fixtures.

In this project, Lucent Optics developed a new platform technology (CoreGLO™) for making aesthetically appealing wide-area LED lighting luminaires at a fraction of the cost of traditional fluorescent and LED fixtures. The CoreGLO technology overcomes the design limitations of traditional lighting luminaires by providing sheet-like and flexible forms. It also provides lighting system developers with new design options such as curved shapes, transparency, and ultra-thin form factors. CoreGLO panels utilizes extremely small amounts of raw materials for distributing light with industry-leading efficiency and without glare. Such panels can be incorporated into various types of traditional lighting systems and will also enable creating new luminaire designs of various innovative forms and shapes. Independent performance tests of the developed prototypes demonstrated a luminaire-level efficacy of more than 120 lumens per Watt, which set a new efficiency record for large-area, thin-sheet lighting sources.