A University of Houston research team led by Jakoah Brgoch, associate professor of chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and principal investigator in the Texas Center for Superconductivity, is developing a safer LED bulb that produces a violet segment of the visible light spectrum.
LED lightbulbs are one type of lighting that offers advantages. A broad consensus considers it more efficient than others, requiring less electricity, but LEDs are not problem-free.
Research has linked overexposure to Standard LED lightbulbs that produce blue-tinted lights to several health concerns such as fatigue, mood disorders, and insomnia. Plus, an expensive lightbulb will cause shoppers to consider other options.
Rather than masking the blue light, the research team is developing a unique phosphor material that absorbs the violet single-color light and converts the light to cover the majority visible spectrum.
“Our team is creating phosphors that operate, not with the conventional blue LED chip that LED light bulb uses today, but with a violet LED chip. This use is shifted from blue to violet as the base source and then converts the violet LED light into the broad-spectrum white light that we see,” explained Professor Brgoch.
He continued: “Our goal is for this new violet-based bulb to be as energy-efficient and also cheap, eventually making new lighting technology marketable to consumers.”
Results of their recent development were recently published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, a journal of the American Chemical Society. However, the team is still experimenting to find the most feasible lightbulbs regarding energy efficiency and economy.