FRANCE: The first mass-market use of the two-dimensional form of carbon known as graphene appears set to be LED lighting. Graphene Lighting plc, as spinoff company from the University of Manchester in the UK, aims to commercialize a graphene light bulb that will be on the market within months, according to the university.
The university claims graphene lightbulbs will have lower energy emissions, longer lifetime and lower manufacturing costs compared with traditional LED bulbs. But according to Fabian Hoelzenbein, an analyst with the Lighting and LEDs team at IHS Technology, these attributes are unlikely to be as important as the quality of the light produced by the graphene bulb—which remains to be seen.
Standard LED bulbs often boast lifetimes of up to 50,000 hours, equivalent to 5.7 hours continuous operation or—in typical usage—a life of 20 years or more.
The University of Manchester is the place where Sir Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov isolated graphene in 2004, earning them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010. Manchester is also where the UK set up the National Graphene Institute (NGI) to become a center of excellence in graphene research.
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