One of the major areas of research under taken in the OEM group focuses on Organic Solid State Lighting. The aims of this work are to produce large area, high efficiency, printed lighting panels which have high uniformity and excellent colour rendering, to be used in commercial applications, both new build and retro fit. Achieving these goals will not only help to save some 19% of all electricity used within the UK but also give better quality lighting, new lighting paradigms, save waste and transportation costs, eliminate mercury from lighting and reduce maintainance costs throught ownership.

We are woking towards these goals in collaboration with Thorn Lighting based in Spennymoor, Tridonic (electronic drivers and control) also based in Spennymoor, Cambridge Display Technology, Pilkington Glass and Cambridge Ink Jet Technology. Two large scale collaboration projects have been funded by thr technology Stratergy Board and the consortia, these are project TOPLESS £4.5M and Project TOPDRAWER £4.2M.

OSSL is a rapidly growing research field throught Europe, America and Asia. Already, at the small lab scale, white emitting OLEDs have been produced with efficiencies greater than 120 lu/W and at intermediate sixes (15 x 15 cm) better than 65 lu/W. As OLED lighting panels do not require luminieres, they do not suffer the same loss of external efficiency that fluorescent tubes and inorganic LEDs do making OSSL the most efficient practical lighitn sources now avialible.

OSSL elements use multiple chromaphore emitter structures, based on hybrid fluorescent phosphorescent emitter combinations to yield very broas spectra covering 450 nm to 750 nm giving them very high, > 80 CRI.

The OEM group study both the complex photophysics and interactions of the multi emitter systems, triplet interactions in multi chromaphore systems, design new multilayer OLED structures for white light emission and help in the development of new emitters, especial blue and host materials for blue.