Creating Light Using Aluminum Foil

"Cheap, skinny aluminum foil lamps may soon illuminate our lives instead of big, bulky light bulbs.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign made the low-cost lamps by treating aluminum foil bought at the grocery store with an acidic bath. The new light source, which is lighter, brighter, and more efficient than incandescent light, is described in the June issue of the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics".

http://www.livescience.com/technology/070613_aluminumfoil_lamps.html

So, in a few years, will we all be awaiting the release of lights using Cree's newest tin foil ball?

After reading their story I have no clue what they're doing to make that foil glow. How am I supposed to know if I can modify my good hat to do this???

Looks rather amazing. Hopefully it will work out and be into production before incandescents are phased out and flourescent's are phased in. This would eliminate the mercury problem of CFL's as well as the common green tint and some that flicker badly. Of course I'd also like to see LED's replace incandescents if they can get bright enough at a reasonable cost.

Looks to me like a method of creating multiple tiny fluorescent bulbs on an aluminum substrate.

I'm wondering if the small size of the individual gas volumes somehow negates the need for mercury vapor to strike the lamp.

matrixshaman said:

Looks rather amazing. Hopefully it will work out and be into production before incandescents are phased out and flourescent's are phased in. This would eliminate the mercury problem of CFL's as well as the common green tint and some that flicker badly. Of course I'd also like to see LED's replace incandescents if they can get bright enough at a reasonable cost.

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Lifecycle-wise, LEDs can already challenge fluorescents on price in many applications, but the main issue is going to get people to completely switch over from the old thermal ideas of incandescents (insulation of heat) to the new LED ideas (dissipation of heat), and to recognize that the design requirements of fixtures that need to dissipate heat away from semiconductor components are radically different from the requirements of fixtures designed to sufficiently insulate a white-hot wire inside.

"These newfangled LED bulbs are crap! They last way longer in my floor lamps than in my recessed IC cans!"

"There's a reason for that–"

"Yeah! Because LED bulbs are crap!"

Looks to me like a method of creating multiple tiny fluorescent bulbs on an aluminum substrate.

Click to expand...

Yeah...I got the same impression. The over-simplification of the start of the article is akin to saying 'new process for making computer processors from sand! because both have some silicon in them. The alu foil in this case is just one of the minor ingredients. Otherwise, large area phosphor emitting light strips have been around for decades. Perhaps this technology will be more efficient, or cheaper...who knows. However...

"The new light source, which is lighter, brighter, and more efficient than incandescent light"

The truth is, you'll have a hard time finding lighting technology that *doesn't* make that claim over Incan, with the exception of maybe a jar of lighting bugs.

but the main issue is going to get people to completely switch over from the old thermal ideas of incandescents

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{-sigh-} The main issue will be getting people to think about illumination in terms of their total environment, and not just holes in their ceiling meant to be filled by cheap light-bulbs that cost 1/50 the price of an LED bulb that struggles to make half the photons.