HP, Raytheon Reflect MIT Lightbulb Research

• ByCarmen Nobel,
• On 5:00 am EST, Wednesday November 4, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (TheStreet) -- Vladimir Bulovic met with President Barack Obama last month, and they discussed light bulbs.

If that sounds like a waste of time for the leader of the free world, consider that artificial lighting consumes an estimated 22% of the nation's electricity and almost double that share in office buildings. Bulovic, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to do something about that. He has created 45 patented inventions in areas such as organic and nano-structured LEDs, lasers and photovoltaics, all with the aim of building more efficient sources of light.

The work Bulovic and his students conducted in the field of quantum dot lighting (aka "nanocrystals") was the basis of QD Vision, a Watertown, Mass., startup on the verge of launching the first quantum dot/LED lamp, in partnership with Nexxus Lighting. The lights "integrate a quantum dot optic with cool white LEDs to produce color-rich, warm white light at the high efficiency of 65 lumens per watt," he says. "Quantum dot lamp lights last five years if continuously left on, longer in intermittent use, so lighting becomes part of the architecture instead of a bi-monthly consumable. The brightness of these lights is equivalent to 75-watt incandescent light bulbs, but they use only a quarter of the energy."

TheStreet.com caught up with Bulovic to discuss the age of artificial illumination, his meeting with Obama, and the role of government and business in early-stage clean-energy projects.

Why is artificial lighting so inefficient?

A lot of it has to do with controlling the mechanism for generating just the right color of light while minimizing waste of energy. For example, in incandescent light bulbs, 95% of the energy goes toward making heat, with only 5 percent resulting in visible light. With fluorescent lights, it's 80% heat, 20% light.

Explain quantum dot lighting and how it bests the current LED technology.

The key in their high-quality performance are the brightly luminescent nanocrystal quantum dots, pioneered by my colleague and friend Professor Moungi Bawendi here at MIT. The quantum dot phosphors are chemically engineered nanometer-scale crystals, whose color can be tuned to emit across the visible spectrum, enabling us to precisely pick the needed emission colors.

What was it like to meet the president?

President Obama is very inquisitive, asking insightful questions and elaborating with detail on the answers I provided him. I thanked the president for the steadfast government support of university research, noting that the complex nanostructured materials growth system in front of which we were standing -- which enabled the technological advances I was showing him -- was nearly exclusively funded by the federal government programs from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. Comparatively, a smaller amount of laboratory funding arrives from private industry. In my research laboratory, it was the government input that allowed us to get to where we are.

Why does clean-energy research rely so heavily on government funding, as opposed to other industries -- software, for example -- that get private funding or enter into corporate partnerships?

It typically takes 10 years for any invention we make in a laboratory to reach commercial application. Such a timeline is not compatible with typical industrially funded projects, which are directed toward short-term goals -- things that need to be developed in the next couple of years. Industry funding is often not for the big-picture endeavors, whereas what government funding often supports are the great ideas, the concepts which, if ever reached, would have a fundamentally great impact. Many of the new clean-energy projects require such a prolonged, steadfast financial commitment to reach technical success. Hence, that's why federal-government funding is much better-suited.

At what point do you approach a corporation for funding?

You reach the point in any project when you ask yourself, "How many more miracles do we need to invent to make this thing work?" If it's more than one miracle, you're not ready for corporate funding.

You have 45 published patents, many of which have been licensed and used by private companies. Can you tell me about a few of those, how you went about licensing them and where they are now?

Besides QD Vision, my patents are licensed by Universal Display Corp., which works on OLED high-efficiency displays. ICx Technologies is licensing our chemical-sensing bomb-sniffing technology, which surpasses the detection ability of a dog's nose. Kateeva, another startup from MIT, is looking at conquering the last challenge of the OLED technology, which is printed displays. Global Photonic Energy Corp. licenses our organic photovoltaic patents. We presently work with Raytheon on quantum dot photo-detectors, and we have had a very productive research relationship with HP in the past. Of the big, multinational companies I have had a chance to work with I will single out HP and their Corvallis, Oregon-based printing division as being particularly adept in recognizing the value of university research and seeking productive long-term research relationships that benefited both MIT students and HP scientists. Significant revenue is generated only with a few blockbuster inventions, the best example of which would likely be the invention of Gatorade at the University of Florida.

-- Reported by Carmen Nobel in Boston.

Buzz up!