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Student Innovator at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Seeks Brighter, Smarter, and More Efficient LEDs
$30,000 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prizes
Awarded to Inventive Students at Three Leading
Universities
Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute student Ming Ma has developed a new method to
manufacture light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that are brighter,
more energy efficient, and have superior technical properties
than those on the market today. His patent-pending invention
holds the promise of hastening the global adoption of LEDs and
reducing the overall cost and environmental impact of
illuminating our homes and businesses.
For this innovation, Ma, a doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science
and Engineering, has been named the winner of the
prestigious 2013 $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize. He
is among the three 2013 $30,000
Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize winners announced
today.
“For more than 175 years, Rensselaer has produced some of
the world’s most successful engineers and scientists, explorers
and scholars, innovators and entrepreneurs. Doctoral student
Ming Ma, with his groundbreaking invention of GRIN LEDs, honors
and continues this tradition of excellence,” said David Rosowsky, dean
of the School of Engineering at
Rensselaer. “Rensselaer and the School of Engineering offer a
hearty congratulations to Ming for his achievement. We also
applaud all of the winners, finalists, and entrants of the
Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize for using their talent
and passion to engineer a better world and a better
tomorrow.”
Ma is the seventh recipient of the Lemelson-Rensselaer
Student Prize. First given in 2007, the prize is awarded
annually to a Rensselaer senior or graduate student who has created or improved a product or process,
applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or
demonstrated remarkable inventiveness in other ways.
“Invention is critical to the U.S. economy. It is imperative
we instill a passion for invention in today’s youth, while
rewarding those who are inspiring role models,” said Joshua
Schuler, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program.
“This year’s Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize winners and
finalists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign prove that inventions and
inventive ideas have the power to impact countless individuals
and entire industries for the better.”
For videos and photos of Ma and other award finalists,
please visit: www.eng.rpi.edu/lemelson
Seeking Brighter, Smarter LEDs
Conventional incandescent and fluorescent light
sources are increasingly being replaced by more
energy-efficient, longer-lived, and environmentally friendlier
LEDs, but LEDs still suffer from challenges related to
brightness, efficiency, and performance With his project,
“Graded-refractive-index (GRIN) Structures for Brighter and
Smarter Light-Emitting Diodes,” Ma faced these problems head-on
and tackled a fundamental, well-known technical shortcoming of
LED materials.
LEDs are hampered by low light-extraction efficiency—or the
percentage of produced light that actually escapes from the LED
chip. Currently, most unprocessed LEDs have a light-extraction
efficiency of only 25 percent, which means 75 percent of light
produced gets trapped within the device itself.
One solution that has emerged is to roughen the surface of
LEDs, in order to create nanoscale gaps and valleys that enable
more light to escape. While surface roughening leads to
brighter and more efficient light emission, the roughening
process creates random features on the LED’s surface that do
not allow for a complete control over other critical device
properties such as surface structure and refractive index.
Freeing Trapped Light with GRIN LEDs
Ma’s solution to this problem was to create an LED
with well-structured features on the surface to minimize the
amount of light that gets reflected back into the device, and
thus boost the amount of light emitted. He invented a process
for creating LEDs with many tiny star-shaped pillars on the
surface. Each pillar is made up of five nanolayers specifically
engineered to help “carry” the light out of the LED material
and into the surrounding air.
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| Ma’s patent-pending technology, called
GRIN (graded-refractive-index) LEDs, has demonstrated a
light-extraction efficiency of 70 percent, meaning 70
percent of light escaped and only 30 percent was left
trapped inside the device. |
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Ma’s patent-pending technology, called GRIN
(graded-refractive-index) LEDs, has demonstrated a
light-extraction efficiency of 70 percent, meaning 70 percent
of light escaped and only 30 percent was left trapped inside
the device—a huge improvement over the 25 percent
light-extraction efficiency of most of today’s unprocessed
LEDs. In addition, GRIN LEDs also have controllable emission
patterns, and enable a more uniform illumination than today’s
LEDs.
Overall, Ma’s innovation could lead to entirely new methods
for manufacturing LEDs with increased light output, greater
efficiency, and more controllable properties than both
surface-roughened LEDs and the LEDs currently available in the
marketplace.
Impactful Researcher
Ma joined Rensselaer in 2008 as a member of Professor
E. Fred Schubert’s
research team. In his time at Rensselaer, Ma has been the first
author on five research papers, published in Applied
Physics Letters, Journal of Applied Physics, and
Optics Express, and co-author of several studies in
other journals. He is also a reviewer for Optics
Letters and Optics Express.
“Ming Ma is an outstanding student—strongly motivated,
creative, intelligent, and highly skilled,” said Schubert, the
Wellfleet Senior Professor in the Future Chips
Constellation at Rensselaer and a faculty member of the
university’s Department of Electrical,
Computer, and Systems Engineering and Department of Physics,
Applied Physics, and Astronomy. “Ming’s technical
accomplishments are innovative, and have had a significant
impact on the LED materials research community. The innovation
of GRIN LEDs should not be underestimated—Ma’s invention is the
first viable approach for high-efficiency LEDs with a
controllable far-field emission pattern. This is an important
development for LED lighting, and it is already capturing the
attention of industry.”
Growing up in Jiangxi Province in southeast China, Ma
fostered an early love of science. This fascination was
fostered by his father, a newspaper editor, and his mother, a
mechanical engineer at a pharmaceutical manufacturer. Ma became
interested in advanced materials as an undergraduate student at
Fudan University in Shanghai, which inspired him to study LEDs
as a graduate student at Rensselaer.
Upon completing his doctoral degree from Rensselaer later
this year, Ma plans to continue researching materials and LEDs
in academia or industry.
Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prizes
Winners of the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate
Student Prize were also announced today at their respective
universities:
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Lemelson-MIT
Student Prize Winner Nikolai Begg has developed medical
devices to make “puncture access” medical procedures, such as
laparoscopic surgeries and epidurals, less risky. Many
minimally invasive procedures use puncture access devices
that plunge forward after breaking through tissue. Begg’s
“force sensing” mechanism has a blade that retracts the
moment it passes through tissue, significantly lowering the
risk of damage to underlying organs when creating a pathway
into the patient’s body.
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Lemelson-Illinois
Student Prize Winner Eduardo Torrealba has created Plant
Link, which monitors the moisture needs of specific plants
and can deliver water on an as needed basis using smart
valves. The evolution of this wireless product will make
agricultural water resource management easier and more
affordable than ever on a global scale. Ranging from home
lawns and gardens to farms in emerging economies, this
technology has a huge potential to impact the sustainability
and costs of water usage.
About the $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student
Prize
The $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize is
funded through a partnership with the Lemelson-MIT Program,
which has awarded the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize to
outstanding student inventors at MIT since 1995.
About The Lemelson-MIT Program
Celebrating innovation, inspiring
youth
The Lemelson-MIT Program celebrates outstanding
innovators and inspires young people to pursue creative lives
and careers through invention.
Jerome H. Lemelson, one of U.S. history’s most prolific
inventors, and his wife, Dorothy, founded the Lemelson-MIT
Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994.
It is funded by The Lemelson Foundation and administered by the
School of Engineering. The Lemelson Foundation uses the power
of invention to improve lives by inspiring and enabling the
next generation of inventors and invention-based enterprises to
promote economic growth in the United States and social and
economic progress for the poor in developing countries. http://web.mit.edu/invent/
Read about past winners of the $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer
Student Prize:
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Published
March 5,
2013 |
Contact: Michael Mullaney
Phone: (518) 276-6161
E-mail: mullam@rpi.edu |
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