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\nCadiz, Spain - While significant challenges remain and large-scale applications appear relatively far out on the horizon, smaller scale applications, such as organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), are already being built into a variety of electronic products. Industry pioneers, such as G24i, have begun manufacturing their first generation of products, which in G24i's case includes a DSC-powered mobile phone charger and an award-winning "Lighting Africa" portable lamp that marries cutting-edge LED and dye-sensitized thin-film PV technologies. \n\nLooking to bring off-grid electrical power options to people in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and a still growing range of African countries, G24i in May was awarded the World Bank Group's 2008 "Lighting Africa Development Marketplace" prize for its solar-powered LED light, which uses the company's proprietary dye-sensitized thin-film solar cells in concert with light emitting diodes (LED) produced by Dutch lighting manufacturer Lemnis. \n\nG24i dye-sensitized thin-film solar cells are proving themselves rugged enough to endure some of the harshest conditions on the planet. Besides enduring the rigors of operating in various African locations, the company's DSC cells were used to generate electrical power for British explorer Robert Swan and his team during their two-week 'E-Base Goes Live' project in which they traveled to Antarctica. Despite poor sunlight, the cells contributed to the successful powering of satellite, digital and video conferencing and other communications equipment throughout the two-week long expedition.\n\nThe first person to walk to the North and South Poles, Swan is moving on to an educational sailing around the world project and G24i is working on sails for his craft that will have thin-film dye-sensitized PV cells embedded in them. \n

Light weighting as a strategy to combat emission and mileage targets has carved a niche corner in automotive original equipment manufacturers' (OEMs') and supplier's research and development. Almost all OEMs have been working on ambitious weight reduction strategies to adhere to future regulations. Light weighting has a profound effect as a long-term strategy, as OEMs transit from making ICE-powered vehicles to battery electric and fuel-cell vehicles. Light weighting as a strategy has implications in other industries such as aviation and power generation. This market insight provides insights on the key factors such as emissions, mileage targets, emission test cycles, electrification, urbanization, and cost and their influence on OEM light weighting strategies.

UK-based lighting specialist Chalmor was declared the overall winner for the second consecutive year in the Sports Lighting category of the Energy Management and Innovation in Lighting Award Scheme (EMILAS) awards.

LEDs may be snagging the majority of light bulb headlines these days, but Panasonic's apparently found some room for improvement with compact fluorescents, with it now proclaiming that its new Pa-Look Ball Premium Q bulbs boast the world first "hybrid lighting method.

Nexans the leading cablemaker has won a contract from Almabani to supply special airfield lighting cables for King Abdul Aziz International Airport (KAIA) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The contract includes the supply of 1,500 km of 5kV easy-to-install and watertight primary cables to connect the power network to the lighting transformers located on runways that power the airfield lights. Deliveries of the cable manufactured at Nexans' Lyon, France plant, began in 2008 and continue in 2009.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have set a world record in solar cell efficiency with a photovoltaic device that converts 40.8% of the light that hits it into electricity. This is the highest confirmed efficiency of any photovoltaic device to date. The inverted metamorphic triple-junction solar cell was designed, fabricated and independently measured at NREL. The 40.8% efficiency was measured under concentrated light of 326 suns. One sun is about the amount of light that typically hits Earth on a sunny day. The new cell is a candidate for the space satellite market and for terrestrial concentrated photovoltaic arrays, which use lenses or mirrors to focus sunlight onto solar cells.

this first-of-a-kind motor converts light directly into mechanical energy,

If you don't know what an OLED is by now, we're here to help, because it's time you informed yourself. It stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode, and it's one of the biggest up and coming technologies. You may also have heard it refered to as a Light Emitting Polymer (LEP) or Organic Electro-Luminescence (OEL).

It seems that in the last decade scientists have switched goals from producing efficient LEDs to producing "natural light" LEDs. However, whenever this was achieved, significant efficiency sacrifices were made to enable experimentation to work. Through use of a nano-crystaline coating, it seems that scientists at Bilkent University, Turkey have succeeded in creating an LED that "produces attractive white light while wasting next-to-no electricity". The definition of attractive is that for each watt of light produced, around 300 lumens are visible to the human eye. This compares with fluorescents which produce around 80 lumens per watt, according to the article. There is however a barrier to market. This is because the nano-crystalline coating is expensive and apparently difficult to produce.

Growing a mixed "lawn" of two kinds of nanowires can make a new kind of light-sensing array that could be made in metre-scale sheets. The researchers behind the prototype say such cheap, high-quality image sensors would allow uses not conceivable using today's more expensive technology. Current sensors, such as those found in digital cameras, are made like any other silicon chip - they are carved out from a block of material. The new nanowire sensors are instead built from the bottom up, using chemically-grown nano-sized components. A research team led by Ali Javey, at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the process. They start by growing an unruly "lawn" of nanowires on a surface. The crop is then printed onto another surface, a step that simultaneously tidies them up. "At the first stage, the nanowires are more-or-less standing up, like a bad hair day. But during the printing process, they effectively get combed," says Javey. The nanowires, which are a few tenths of a millimetre long and a few tens of nanometres wide, can be printed onto anything from silicon to plastic or paper. Whatever the surface, it must be prepared with a pattern that guides the nanowires to predetermined locations. To make the functioning sensor, two different "crops" of nanotubes are printed onto the same surface. Cadmium selenide nanowires produce electric charge when hit by light, while those made from silicon-coated germanium act as transistors to amplify that charge.