A Nanophotonic Comeback for Incandescent Bulbs?

Incandescent lighting and its warm, familiar glow is well over a century old yet survives virtually unchanged in homes around the world.  That is changing fast, however, as regulations aimed at improving energy efficiency are phasing out the old bulbs in favor of more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) and newer light-emitting diode bulbs (LEDs).

Incandescent bulbs, commercially developed by Thomas Edison (and still used by cartoonists as the symbol of inventive insight), work by heating a thin tungsten wire to temperatures of around 2,700 degrees Celsius.  That hot wire emits what is known as black body radiation, a very broad spectrum of light that provides a warm look and a faithful rendering of all colors in a scene.

But these bulbs have always suffered from one major problem:  More than 95 percent of the energy that goes into them is wasted, most of it as heat.  That’s why country after country has banned or is phasing out the inefficient technology.  Now, researchers at MIT and Purdue University may have found a way to change all that.
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Light recycling
The key is to create a two-stage process, the researchers report.  The first stage involves a conventional heated metal filament, with all its attendant losses.  But instead of allowing the waste heat to dissipate in the form of infrared radiation, secondary structures surrounding the filament capture this radiation and reflect it back to the filament to be re-absorbed and re-emitted as visible light.  These structures, a form of photonic crystal, are made of Earth-abundant elements and can be made using conventional material-deposition technology.

That second step makes a dramatic difference in how efficiently the system converts electricity into light.  One quantity that characterizes a lighting source is the so-called luminous efficiency, which takes into account the response of the human eye.  Whereas the luminous efficiency of conventional incandescent lights is between 2 and 3 percent, that of fluorescents (including CFLs) is between 7 and 15 percent, and that of most compact LEDs between 5 and 15 percent, the new two-stage incandescents could reach efficiencies as high as 40 percent, the team says.

A Nanophotonic Comeback for Incandescent Bulbs?