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Energy@Rensselaer: Moving Smarter LEDs From the Laboratory to the Marketplace
NSF-Funded Smart Lighting ERC at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute Engages Key Industrial Partners To
Foster, Guide LED Innovations
Now in its third year, the Smart Lighting
Engineering Research Center (ERC) has enlisted 21 key
industrial partners to help guide the center’s leading-edge
research programs and hasten the transition of important
innovations from the lab bench to the marketplace.
The center is dedicated to developing new light-emitting
diode (LED) technologies and applications for smarter,
better-performing lighting devices and systems. Launched in
2008 and funded primarily by the
National Science Foundation, the ERC is led by Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute.
“The rapidly growing industry membership in the Smart
Lighting ERC is a testimony to the quality of the
transformative research being conducted on future lighting
systems by the ERC faculty and students,” said ERC Director Robert
Karlicek. “It is also firm support for the ERC’s vision of
smart lighting systems, which are poised to revolutionize
lighting by creating immersive lighting systems that can sense
their environment to provide new levels of energy efficiency,
health and safety benefits, and enhanced workplace
productivity.”
Among the center’s industrial
partners are leading LED companies including Osram Sylvania
and Taiwan-based Epistar.
“Riding on the backbone of energy-efficient improvements in
materials and performance, the Smart Lighting ERC is providing
a state-of-the-art center in which we from industry engage
academia to prove concepts at platform levels, ahead of
industry acceptance and uptake,” said Matthew Stough, director
of engineering, materials and processes, and research
coordinator at Osram Sylvania.
“Epistar is pleased to join the Smart Lighting Engineering
Research Center. Their work on transformative LED and lighting
technology is of critical importance to the development of
advanced solid state lighting systems, and we look forward to
supporting those efforts as a member of the ERC,” said Steve
Hong, director of research and development at Epistar.
While the promise of LEDs as a long-lived, energy-efficient
heir to light bulbs is undeniable, the true promise of LED and
solid-state lighting technology transcends illumination. LEDs
offer the potential to control, manipulate, and use light in
entirely new ways for a surprisingly diverse range of
areas.
To realize the potential of solid-state lighting technology,
the ERC team is working to create better LEDs, as well as new
sensors and systems required to effectively to monitor and
control these LEDs. More than 30 ERC faculty researchers at
Rensselaer and partner universities are actively working toward
this goal, along with dozens of student researchers,
postdoctoral researchers, and visiting industry engineers.
Along with Rensselaer, core ERC university partners are Boston University
and the
University of New Mexico. ERC university outreach partners
are Howard University in Washington; Morgan State University in
Baltimore; and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre
Haute, Ind.
The ERC’s many industry partners, ranging from major
lighting companies to small startup firms, help guide strategic
planning, spur innovation, and provide university students with
first-hand experience in entrepreneurship as well as corporate
research and development. This summer, four ERC graduate
students have taken internships with ERC industrial partners,
and two ERC students have started a new company based on ERC
technology and will be supported this summer by a Boston-based
venture capital firm.
For more information on the Smart Lighting ERC at
Rensselaer, visit:
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Published
June 9,
2011 |
Contact: Michael Mullaney
Phone: (518) 276-6161
E-mail: mullam@rpi.edu |
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