Lighting

If Silicon Valley is where big minds fixate on small problems – a better way to hail a taxi or swap photos on your smartphone – then the ��Ƶ may soon be known as the place where the world’s biggest, most intractable issues are solved.

That was the underlying message at U of T’s recent Toronto Sustainability Summit, held at the MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto.

The sold-out event brought together leading U of T researchers, key government officials and senior industry executives to discuss ways to work together to tackle planet-threatening climate change. Reza Moridi, Ontario’s minister of research, innovation and science, took the opportunity to announce a new, $7 million competition designed to develop breakthrough technologies to help the province’s industrial plants reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Polanyi Prize goes to U of T researcher for his work on more efficient solar materials

sgupta — Tue, 17 Nov 2015 12:57:54 +0000

Polanyi Prize goes to U of T researcher for his work on more efficient solar materials sgupta Tue, 11/17/2015 - 07:57

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(photo by Marit Mitchell)

Marit Mitchell

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Marit Mitchell

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Engineering postdoc one of five recognized as outstanding Ontario researchers in early states of their careers

Riccardo Comin, a postdoctoral fellow in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, has won the 2015 John Charles Polanyi Prize for Physics for his research into a rapidly emerging new class of materials, called perovskites, for more efficient solar cells and lighting.

The Polanyi Prizes are given annually to outstanding researchers in the early stages of their careers. The prizes, worth $20,000 each, are awarded in five areas: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economic science. Comin is the only recipient from the ��Ƶ this year. (Read about some of U of T's previous Polanyi Prize winners.)

“By scientific upbringing, I’m a solid state physicist,” said Comin. “I take new compounds, films or crystals, crafted by chemists, and I analyze them to figure out what’s special about those materials.”

Comin’s work, under the direction of Professor Ted Sargent, is to investigate the mysterious properties of a very special family of hybrid organic-inorganic materials called perovskites. Perovskites show great promise for a range of applications, from more efficient LED technologies to high-efficiency flexible and lightweight solar cells.

Read more about Comin’s recent work, published in the journals Science and Nature:

“My work in the Sargent Group has been to explore various key characteristics of perovskites, including their chemical composition, crystalline structure, and electronic structure,” said Comin. “Thanks to the Polanyi Prize, I plan to expand my work into using x-ray methods to look at the collective phenomena involving the reorientation of the organic molecules embedded in the inorganic crystalline structure of these hybrid materials.”

Comin earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Universita degli Studi di Trieste in Italy, both in physics. He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Andrea Damascelli, where he worked on characterizing quantum materials. When he joined the Sargent Group for his postdoctoral fellowship, he was ready to take a more applied approach to his research.

“I’d done a lot of fundamental materials science, and I was thinking, ‘What are the strategies and processes involved in harnessing and functionalizing the material properties that are key for devices that realize solar, imaging or lighting applications?’” he said “Here, we’re trying not just to develop high-quality materials, but also to combine them into device architectures that use the best properties of these materials. Ultimately, the metric for the quality of the work is the efficiency and performance of our devices.”

The John Charles Polanyi prize was created in honour of the achievement of John Charles Polanyi, recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and a professor in the ��Ƶ’s department of chemistry.

“My congratulations to Riccardo, who is doing exceptional research,” said Professor Sargent, vice-dean, research for the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, and Comin’s supervisor.

“It’s particularly wonderful to see him honoured with this award, named after one of the greatest investigators in the ��Ƶ’s long history.”

Learn more about the other 2015 John Charles Polanyi winners

Marit Mitchell is a writer with the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at the ��Ƶ

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Solar-powered lamp from U of T to transform lives in Philippines

sgupta — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 06:52:50 +0000

Solar-powered lamp from U of T to transform lives in Philippines sgupta Thu, 11/05/2015 - 01:52

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(all photos by Neda Ghazi)

Terry Lavender

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Terry Lavender

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Global Lens

Features

Social Entrepreneurship

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Cynthia Goh: “A poor fisherman or farmer who’s been working all day does not want to have to keep pumping a flashlight in order to light his house.”

Thanks to U of T’s Impact Centre, people in rural parts of the Philippines may soon get access to something that the western world takes for granted: being able to walk into a dark room, flick a switch and get instant light.

Professor Cynthia Goh, the Centre’s director, said rural areas of the Philippines, along with other regions of the global south, rarely have access to electricity.

The Philippines are close to the equator, so “it goes from very bright to very dark within a few minutes,” Goh said. “The sun goes down at 6 p.m. sharp and rises at 6 a.m. every day, which means for 12 whole hours, inhabitants are not able to study, do housework, or be productive.”

To celebrate the 2015 International Year of Light, the Impact Centre – part of U of T's Banting & Best Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship – set itself a goal to create a reliable, low-cost light that provides at least four hours of light a day.

“We want it to be bright enough and a good enough quality so that a child can read and a mother can cook,” Goh said.

The light also had to be easy to use, she said. Many lighting solutions designed for developing countries require winding up or pumping, or only provide inadequate, short-term light, she said.

“A poor fisherman or farmer who’s been working all day does not want to have to keep pumping a flashlight in order to light his house. Just because people are poor, doesn’t mean that they should be subject to inconveniences.”

The Impact Centre's lighting solution is a great example of the kind of social entrepreneurship that flourishes at U of T, said Karen Sievewright, director of U of T's Banting & Best Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

“The breadth and depth of research coupled with a wide range of support at the university allows our entrepreneurs to bring better, smarter and more sustainable lighting to the world.”

These undergrad interns are helping to power Nanoleaf: Jeanny Yao and Josh Hwang

sgupta — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 10:59:15 +0000

These undergrad interns are helping to power Nanoleaf: Jeanny Yao and Josh Hwang sgupta Mon, 11/02/2015 - 05:59

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(image courtesy Nanoleaf)

Brianna Goldberg

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Brianna Goldberg

Nanoleaf

Undergraduate Education

Undergraduate Students

Why would a fast-growing LED lighting startup hire a statistician and a scientist as business development interns?

Nanoleaf – a global startup from U of T Engineering alumni – says it was for their different perspective and critical mindset. (Read more about Nanoleaf)

“The U of T presence is still very strong at Nanoleaf, and I believe it always will be,” said spokesperson Leslie Chen. “When we were looking for interns to join our team, the first place we looked was at U of T.”

The interns, who hooked into Nanoleaf's team through a specialized new venture internship course called IMC390, get to earn course credits while exploding all conventions of what they can do with their degree.

Interested in learning more about startups and entrepreneurship at U of T? Visit the Banting & Best Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

(Video courtesy Nanoleaf's Smarter Kit Indiegogo)

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Nanoleaf launches new product for Apple home system

sgupta — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 16:25:27 +0000

Nanoleaf launches new product for Apple home system sgupta Tue, 10/27/2015 - 12:25

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The Nanoleaf Ivy bulb (hanging) and hub (on table) work in connection with Apple HomeKit

Brianna Goldberg

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Brianna Goldberg

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Siri lets users wirelessly control alumni’s award-winning super-efficient LED bulbs

Nanoleaf, the fast-growing startup from ��Ƶ alumni, launched a new product Oct. 27 tied to Apple's HomeKit line.

“We've received Apple's approval to join the HomeKit ecosystem,” said Nanoleaf spokesperson Leslie Chen.

The Nanoleaf Smarter Kit combines “the world’s most energy efficient smart bulb” and a stylish, connected hub with Apple’s Siri-enabled HomeKit, Chen said. This will allow users to wirelessly control the startup’s award-winning LED bulb designs by simply using their voice. (Read more about Nanoleaf and the new Nanoleaf Smarter Kit)

“With the emergence of smart home products, lighting is entering a whole new territory,” said Chen, one of a growing number of recent U of T grads recruited to Nanoleaf.

“Imagine sitting in the living room and being able to control all of the lights in your home with just a few words,” she said. “Pretty revolutionary to say the least!”

Chen said the Ivy is an app-controlled bulb that users can turn on, off and dim using their Apple phone, tablet or smart watch. The Nanoleaf Smarter Kit is set for release in selected Best Buy locations in early November, she added, with more details still to come.

“Integrating technology like this, especially through a company as famed as Apple, is a great way to reach a wider audience and get access to a new market,” said Karen Sievewright, managing director of U of T's Banting & Best Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship. “It’s a smart move by Nanoleaf.”

The green tech startup founded by Engineering alumni Gimmy Chu, Christian Yan and Tom Rodinger has grown from a massively successful Kickstarter project in early 2013, based on the strength of their stylish “world’s most energy efficient” bulb, to a bustling company with approximately 40 employees spread between its Toronto and Shenzhen, China, offices.

The venture recently scored funding from ‘Asia’s richest philanthropist,’ debuted products at fairs in New York, Shanghai and Tokyo and won a reddot design award for 2015.

Read about Nanoleaf’s Kickstarter surpassing its goal by 500 per cent

Read about ‘Asia’s richest philanthropist’ investing in Nanoleaf

Read about Nanoleaf creating green jobs in Canada and China

Read about Nanoleaf’s revolutionary dimming bulb

Chen says the next big step for Nanoleaf will be releasing a product they believe will change the way people think about lighting.

“Light is not merely illumination. Light is atmosphere, it wakes you up after a night of sleep, it keeps us safe and content, just as much today as two million years ago,” said Chu, CEO of Nanoleaf. “We want to make products that will transform simple lighting solutions into meaningful experiences.”

Nanoleaf made the announcement as U of T's Impact Centre prepared to host a symposium celebrating the International Year of Light. (Read more about the IYL Symposium)

Chen says the gains of Nanoleaf rely on the team members they continue to recruit from U of T.

“The U of T presence is still very strong at Nanoleaf, and I believe it always will be,” said Chen. “When we were looking for interns to join our team, the first place we looked was at U of T.”

Watch for U of T News stories profiling Nanoleaf's three undergrad interns, Jeanny Yao, Frank Gu and Josh Hwang in the coming week.

“Nanoleaf will always be very closely connected with U of T: our three founders are all alumni and without the school, they would have never met in the first place,” said Chen.

“It will always be part of our identity and I think that’s why U of T grads are a good fit for us.”

(Video courtesy Nanoleaf's Smarter Kit Indiegogo)

Learn more about entrepreneurships and startups at U of T: visit the Banting & Best Centre for Entrepreneurship.

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Fiat lux: what do you get when you combine perovskite and colloidal dots?

sgupta — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 10:07:14 +0000

Fiat lux: what do you get when you combine perovskite and colloidal dots? sgupta Fri, 07/17/2015 - 06:07

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Riccardo Comin (left) and Xiwen Gong combined two different materials to create new hyper-efficient light-emitting crystal (photo by Marit Mitchell)

Marit Mitchell

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Marit Mitchell

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U of T researchers engineer hybrid solar-power crystal that opens new frontiers in high-efficiency lighting

It’s snack time: you have a plain oatmeal cookie, and a pile of chocolate chips. Both are delicious on their own but if you can find a way to combine them smoothly, you get the best of both worlds.

Researchers in the ��Ƶ's Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering used this insight to invent something totally new: they’ve combined two promising solar cell materials together for the first time, creating a new platform for LED technology.

The team designed a way to embed strongly luminescent nanoparticles called colloidal quantum dots (the chocolate chips) into perovskite (the oatmeal cookie). Perovskites are a family of materials that can be easily manufactured from solution, and that allow electrons to move swiftly through them with minimal loss or capture by defects.

A glowing quantum dot seamlessly integrated into a perovskite crystal matrix (Image: Ella Marushchenko).

The work was published July 15 in the international journal Nature.

“It’s a pretty novel idea to blend together these two optoelectronic materials, both of which are gaining a lot of traction,” said Xiwen Gong, one of the study’s lead authors and a PhD candidate working with Professor Ted Sargent. “We wanted to take advantage of the benefits of both by combining them seamlessly in a solid-state matrix.”

The result is a black crystal that relies on the perovskite matrix to ‘funnel’ electrons into the quantum dots, which are extremely efficient at converting electricity to light. Hyper-efficient LED technologies could enable applications from the visible-light LED bulbs in every home, to new displays, to gesture recognition using near-infrared wavelengths.

“When you try to jam two different crystals together, they often form separate phases without blending smoothly into each other,” said Riccardo Comin, a post-doctoral fellow in the Sargent Group.

“We had to design a new strategy to convince these two components to forget about their differences and to rather intermix into forming a unique crystalline entity.”

The main challenge was making the orientation of the two crystal structures line up, called heteroexpitaxy. To achieve heteroepitaxy, Gong, Comin and their team engineered a way to connect the atomic ‘ends’ of the two crystalline structures so that they aligned smoothly, without defects forming at the seams.

“We started by building a nano-scale scaffolding ‘shell’ around the quantum dots in solution, then grew the perovskite crystal around that shell so the two faces aligned,” explained coauthor Zhijun Ning, who contributed to the work while a post-doctoral fellow at UofT and is now a faculty member at ShanghaiTech.

The resulting heterogeneous material is the basis for a new family of highly energy-efficient near-infrared LEDs. Infrared LEDs can be harnessed for improved night-vision technology, to better biomedical imaging, to high-speed telecommunications.

Combining the two materials in this way also solves the problem of self-absorption, which occurs when a substance partly re-absorbs the same spectrum of energy that it emits, with a net efficiency loss.

“These dots in perovskite don’t suffer reabsorption, because the emission of the dots doesn’t overlap with the absorption spectrum of the perovskite,” Comin said.

Gong, Comin and the team deliberately designed their material to be compatible with solution-processing, so it could be readily integrated with the most inexpensive and commercially practical ways of manufacturing solar film and devices.

Their next step is to build and test the hardware to capitalize on the concept they have proven with this work.

“We’re going to build the LED device and try to beat the record power efficiency reported in the literature,” Gong said.

This work was supported by the Ontario Research Fund Research Excellence Program, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST).

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The organic LED age is here: Meet the U of T engineers behind OTI Lumionics

sgupta — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 10:08:02 +0000

The organic LED age is here: Meet the U of T engineers behind OTI Lumionics sgupta Wed, 02/25/2015 - 05:08

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The OLED research team (above photo by Mark Balson)

Robert Hercz

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Robert Hercz

Google “OLED,” and you’ll find scores of articles confidently predicting that this is the year of the organic light-emitting diode. Some of those articles are ten years old.

Still, there are reasons to believe the OLED age is finally dawning. In fact, engineering alumnus Michael Helander is betting on it.

Three years ago, Helander was a PhD student with an important discovery just published in Science – a rising star who could have had his pick of academic postings. Instead, he gave up a life in research to start a technology company he named OTI Lumionics.

The failure rate of technology startups, by some estimates, is 90 per cent.

Who would trade the life they’d dreamed of for a chance to play Russian roulette with five chambers loaded? Someone who’s counting on a lot more than just luck.

Why the fuss about OLEDs? And what on earth is an OLED? The best answer to both questions is OTI’s first and only consumer product, the aerelight. It’s an aluminum table lamp – sleek, angled, and a little retro (reminiscent of an older Canadian beauty, 1968’s Contempra phone). The light comes from a 10-cm square wafer no thicker than two sheets of paper – an OLED.

Not only is the lamp beautiful, so is its light. OLEDs are cool to the touch but warm to the eye, dimmable, flexible and efficient. They don’t blaze from a single spot like LEDs; they diffuse evenly from every point on their surfaces, which can be arbitrarily large. After seeing the aerelight, other light sources – whether incandescent, fluorescent, or LED – immediately seem huge, hot and obsolete.

(above photo by Roberta Baker)

Like a conventional light-emitting diode, an organic LED produces light when a voltage is placed across it. The difference is the material between the electrodes. Instead of a crystalline semiconductor, OLEDs use organic compounds – plastics, in essence – similar to the pigments used in colour Xerox machines.

“LEDs are grown from perfect single crystals,” says Helander. “The probability of a defect increases exponentially with size, so it’s limited to a point source. Organic molecules don’t have any long-range order, so they don’t need a perfect single-crystal structure to work. That’s what allows you to distribute it across a large surface.”

Lighting isn’t the only place the OLED shines. It’s already made an appearance in smartphone displays and television screens, where its other advantages – richer colours, deeper blacks and near-instantaneous response times – make it the heir apparent to the liquid crystal display. But OTI is staying away from displays. Multinationals such as Samsung and LG have already spent billions to enter and fight over that market.

Lighting, on the other hand, is still in its dark ages. Even the latest technology, the LED, comes packaged to resemble Thomas Edison’s 1880 bulb. That paradigm is about to shift. Soon, a light won’t be a product, but a feature of a surface – any surface. Windows, walls and wallpaper, furniture, cars, and clothes: light will come from everywhere.

If OTI succeeds, Toronto-born Helander will be the reason. He’s a force of nature, intense, ambitious, and, at 29, astonishingly accomplished.

As a kid, he wanted to be a scientist. Then he enrolled in the U of T’s engineering science program (“because people said it was the hardest”) and realized he wanted to be an engineer. While working on his PhD with Zheng-Hong Lu, professor and Canada Research Chair in Organic Optoelectronics in the department of materials science and engineering (“They had lots of shiny equipment, so that got me excited”), he realized he really wanted to be an entrepreneur.

He reached that decision after stumbling on a major discovery. Helander and OTI cofounder Zhibin Wang were working with indium tin oxide (ITO), the industry-standard, transparent yet conductive coating used in every kind of flat-panel display, when they noticed something unexpected. Some of their samples were working far more efficiently – carrying much more current – than they should. They assumed their equipment was improperly calibrated, but soon ruled that out. The effect was real. Their ITO had been contaminated.

It took months to find the culprit: chlorine from open bottles of cleaning fluid. “Basically, breaking the safety rules,” Helander quips. “The next step: how do we make use of it?”

Helander, Wang and Professor Lu published their answer in Science in May of 2011: chlorinated ITO. A one-atom thick layer of chlorine dramatically increased the brightness of OLEDs while reducing their energy consumption by up to 50 per cent. It also drastically lowered their cost by reducing the number of organic layers needed to make a diode from as many as eight to just two or three.

That news was greeted with considerable interest. “Big companies started approaching us,” Helander says. “They wanted to license or buy the technology. We thought, if they’re willing to pay this much now, there must be much more value than they’re letting on. Let’s try making a go of it ourselves.”

So they created OTI Lumionics. The initials don’t stand for anything. It’s just ITO backwards, a declaration that their approach would be 180 degrees from usual. “Lumionics” is a fabricated word that sounds like light, a choice Helander somewhat regrets because nobody seems able to spell it.

At first, Helander thought OTI would be nothing more than a stepping-stone to an academic career. “When we started the company, we viewed it as another checkbox on the academic CV. Successfully commercialized tech: check.”

But as the months rolled by, a desire to finish what they’d started in the lab took root. Helander and Wang decided their future lay with OTI. (Read about the most recent support for OTI Lumionics.) Giving up academia for entrepreneurship wasn’t hard, Helander said. By the time he’d earned his PhD, his name was on over a hundred publications, more than most researchers produce in an entire career.

“When you get up to that number of publications it’s almost like a paper mill; it’s just a formula you’re repeating,” he says. “It felt like we had learned the game and it wasn’t challenging anymore. We wanted new challenges.”

(Above photo of Helander (centre) with team by Roberta Baker)

Helander takes me into the back corner of OTI’s new offices in the ��Ƶ’s venerable Banting Building on College Street. The room is dominated by a seven foot-tall vacuum-deposition chamber that looks like a giant robotic squid.

“This is our rapid prototyping module for organic LEDs,” he explains. “It allows us to make large, flexible panels in about an hour.” He bends a six-inch square sheet of shiny blue-green plastic – a freshly-made OLED – into a half-cylinder. I want to ask for details, but Helander is already talking about his plans for the larger, still empty, room adjacent.

“The pilot scale-up next door will be the same process, except it’ll be ten modules next to each other, so the production time goes down from an hour to minutes.”

Before I can quiz him on that, he’s shifted gears again. “The step after that, starting next year, is building a full production plant, hopefully somewhere in southern Ontario.” Helander speaks very fast, at the edge of comprehensibility, skipping syllables and sometimes entire words in a losing fight to keep up with his own thoughts. “We’ll be pulling together a whole syndicate of partners that are throwing in a whole bunch of support. We’re hoping to get money from the province as well and raise another round of financing. It’s a massive project.”

Sounds ambitious. “Very ambitious,” he says. “People tell us we have lack of focus. But to understand our customers, we have to have our hands in everything. At the same time, we’re a small company. For what we’re doing we should have ten times the personnel and twenty times the capital. Trying to do the impossible – that’s how you succeed.”

It’s clear Helander’s ambition doesn’t stop at table lamps. In fact, it doesn’t even include table lamps – or didn’t, until he and OTI’s senior product designer, Ray Kwa, built a few prototypes. Everyone who saw them had the same three questions: “When can I buy it? When can I buy it? When can I buy it?”

So OTI’s nine employees are making OLED panels and assembling lamps on College Street. At the same time, multibillion-dollar giants like Philips, LG and Konica Minolta are preparing to turn out OLED panels by the million. In a few months, OLED table lamps may be going for a fraction of the price – $239 (USD) – of an aerelight.

Remarkably, Helander is unfazed by that prospect. “That would make us so happy,” he says. “It would prove that we’re on the right track and the market is there.”

Helander’s plan is not to sell lamps but to service niches – lots and lots of niches – that are too small for the giants. “There are a lot of partners we work with who only want 10, 50, 100, units. A massive production line can’t do that effectively. Our vision is to enable hundreds of companies, delivering on-demand whatever people need, for applications in lighting, furniture, automotive, wearables, whatever you want.”

Like any entrepreneur, Helander sounds more confident than he has any right to be. For the foreseeable future, OTI will live amongst threats: an untested market, ever-mutating technology, giants ready to grind him to paste, uncertain financial backing. To defend himself, Helander has little more than a small pool of talents, patents and ambitions.

Of course, in his case, that might just be enough.

Originally published in the 2015 issue of Impact Magazine.

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Alumni startup OTI Lumionics awarded $5.7 million to produce energy-efficient lighting solutions

sgupta — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 09:17:35 +0000

Alumni startup OTI Lumionics awarded $5.7 million to produce energy-efficient lighting solutions sgupta Mon, 02/23/2015 - 04:17

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Alumnus Michael Helander (centre) and his startup, OTI Lumionics, have received significant investment from the Canadian government to build a pilot production line capable of producing high-volumes of their organic LED lighting panels (photo by Roberta

Luke Ng

Author legacy

Luke Ng

It’s about to get a whole lot brighter in Toronto thanks to a significant investment from the Canadian government in a ��Ƶ engineering alumnus’ sustainable lighting company.

OTI Lumionics, a company co-founded by alumnus Michael Helander, has been awarded $5.7 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC). The goal: to implement a pilot production line capable of producing high volumes of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting panels.(Read more about OTI Lumionics.)

“We can make large, flexible OLED panels in about an hour with our rapid prototyping module,” said Helander. “This new pilot production line will be the same process, except it’ll be ten modules next to each other, cutting down the production time from an hour to minutes.”

OTI is one of seven clean technology projects in Ontario announced to receive investments totalling more than $26.8 million from SDTC’s SD Tech Fund™, part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan, supporting jobs, economic growth and the environment.

Founded in 2011, OTI Lumionics was created by Helander and several of his U of T engineering colleagues to commercialize their major breakthrough in OLED technology made during their doctoral studies. Today, OTI employs about a dozen employees – most of them U of T engineering alumni – and is located in a 3,300 square foot office and lab space in the Banting & Best Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship across from the MaRS Discovery District.

Their inaugural product – the world’s first OLED table lamp, aerelight – was launched to market in 2014.

“Congratulations to all of our U of T Engineering alumni at OTI Lumionics. This is a well-deserved recognition of the important work they are doing,” said Professor Jun Nogami, chair of the U of T department of materials science & engineering. “This investment shows that our federal government has a strong commitment to supporting leading edge technologies that will help grow Canada’s green research and development knowledge base as we all work towards a more sustainable future.”

(Read more about Helander and OTI Lumionics’ story in ‘The Glow of Confidence’ feature in the U of T department of materials science and engineering’s recently released Impact magazine.)

Luke Ng is a writer with the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at the ��Ƶ.

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New technique could lead to cheaper, more efficient solar power and LEDs

sgupta — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 09:09:57 +0000

New technique could lead to cheaper, more efficient solar power and LEDs sgupta Fri, 01/30/2015 - 04:09

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as perfect single crystals.

Marit Mitchell

Author legacy

Marit Mitchell

Lighting

Engineering

World's first consumer-ready OLED lamp

sgupta — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 08:10:34 +0000

World's first consumer-ready OLED lamp sgupta Wed, 10/15/2014 - 04:10

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aerelight™ – the world’s first consumer-ready OLED lamp, by U of T Engineering alumni (photo by Roberta Baker)

Luke Ng

RJ Taylor

Author legacy

Luke Ng & RJ Taylor

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New product from alumni startup OTI Lumionics gives investors a glimpse of technology's potential

If you visit the lighting section of your nearest hardware store, chances are you’ll be bombarded by the latest mega-efficient LED bulbs – but to alumnus Michael Helander, that technology is old news.

Helander and a team of former U of T Engineering students recently released the world’s first organic LED (or OLED) lamp, aerelight™. The product harnesses the power of next-generation OLEDs to emit a warm light from a thin sheet of non-toxic, carbon-based materials.

The lamp uses less energy than traditional sources, providing up to 1,000 lux of illumination – double a typical office environment – with only seven watts. It also features a dimming capability, wireless smartphone charging built into the base and, of course, an advanced OLED panel. (Read more about aerelight.)

OLEDs are a sophisticated type of light-emitting diodes that pass electricity through carbon-based dyes and pigments to power lights and displays. While we’ve seen this technology in certain high-end smartphones and premium flat-panel displays, this is the first consumer-ready indoor OLED lighting product ever made.

“We started with a goal of building the aerelight desk lamp, first as a great product, and second as the first consumer-ready OLED lamp,” said Helander, who co-founded OTI Lumionics to commercialize OLEDs in 2011. The startup manufactures the lamps in-house, and is scheduled to ship them to consumers in early 2015.

“With traditional light sources, the bulb is a distinct separate entity from the fixture,” said alumnus and OTI senior product designer Ray Kwa. “With aerelight, I wanted to create a seamless, continuous frame integrating the base, frame and light – synonymous to the OLED light source itself which emits a diffused, fluid soft light.”

Although the lamp’s efficiency and sleek design are already making media headlines, aerelight is actually part of a much greater strategy from OTI to make OLED technology cheaper and easier to manufacture.

“OLEDs have many unique characteristics that make [them] the ideal light source of the future, but potential growth has been stifled by the high manufacturing costs,” said Helander.

In 2011, then-PhD students Helander and Zhibin Wang, along with their supervisor Professor Zheng-Hong Lu, discovered a new method for cost-effective production of OLEDs. Publishing their work in the leading journal, Science, the trio used a single-atom-thick layer of chlorine that simplified the internal structure of OLED technology, while still achieving high brightness and efficiency.

Shortly after the breakthrough, Helander and other U of T Engineering alumni spun off the technology into OTI – taking their ideas to the University's elite accelerator program in the Creative Destruction Lab, based at the Rotman School of Management. Over eight months, they honed the necessary technical and business aspects of their company, while also meeting with Canadian business and entrepreneurship titans.

The fledgling startup has already received significant interest from notable investors, including Lee Lau, ATI Technologies founder and a G7 fellow at U of T’s Creative Destruction Lab, and Roger Martin, former Rotman School of Management dean.

“This is a great example of how new materials like OLEDs can be showcased in a product that represents a paradigm shift in indoor lighting and sustainable technologies,” said Professor Jun Nogami, chair of U of T's department of materials science and engineering.

With their first product hitting desks soon, Helander and his team at OTI continue to make OLED technology more accessible than ever – suggesting a bright future is in store for them as well.

See aerelight for yourself:

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Lighting

Renewable energy research, clean-tech startups from U of T take centre stage

Read more about the summit

Read more about Phantin

Read more about Nanoleaf

Polanyi Prize goes to U of T researcher for his work on more efficient solar materials

Solar-powered lamp from U of T to transform lives in Philippines

Read more about social entrepreneurship

Read more about lighting innovations from U of T

Read more about the International Year of Light

These undergrad interns are helping to power Nanoleaf: Jeanny Yao and Josh Hwang

Read more about Nanoleaf on U of T News

Interested in learning more about startups and entrepreneurship at U of T? Visit the Banting & Best Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Nanoleaf launches new product for Apple home system

Learn more about entrepreneurships and startups at U of T: visit the Banting & Best Centre for Entrepreneurship.

Fiat lux: what do you get when you combine perovskite and colloidal dots?

The organic LED age is here: Meet the U of T engineers behind OTI Lumionics

Alumni startup OTI Lumionics awarded $5.7 million to produce energy-efficient lighting solutions

New technique could lead to cheaper, more efficient solar power and LEDs

World's first consumer-ready OLED lamp