Solution
EUROLED - NANO PARTICLES, GIGA BENEFITS
Solution
Our technology
Seaborough's EuroLED technology is a groundbreaking phosphor technology that offers a radically new approach to designing the optical properties of luminescent materials. We achieve this by utilizing separate materials for absorption and emission events, which means that they can be independently adjusted to suit any desired application.
EuroLED is the first commercial phosphor to utilize nanomaterials, with particle sizes that can be precisely tuned ranging from sub-100 nm to several microns. The technology's ability to fine-tune both the optical properties and particle sizes makes it highly adaptable and applicable to a wide range of potential uses.
Euroled for white leds
EuroLED was initially developed to introduce line emitters to solid state lighting applications. This technology features the first-ever Eu3+-based phosphor, which is known for having ultra-narrow emission lines in the red spectral range. This makes it an excellent option for producing high-quality, efficient white light. Despite the well-known advantages of Eu3+ emission spectra for LEDs, these materials have faced challenges in commercial LED applications due to their low excitation efficiency with blue light.
By unlocking the potential of Eu3+-based phosphors for LEDs, EuroLED can transform the LED industry. It provides access to never-before-available spectral engineering tools, which are currently the best solution for achieving further lumen gains. EuroLED promises to offer 10-20% more lm/W over the entire CRI 80-95 range, compared to CASN-based warm white LEDs, resulting in significant energy savings and increased lm/$ values.
A great additional added value of EuroLED is that its materials are durable, cost-effective, and can be easily integrated into LED production lines. It utilizes fully inorganic and non-toxic materials that have been brought down to the nanoscale. EuroLED is the ideal choice for a wide range of applications where efficient, high-quality lighting is crucial.
Current market solutions
EuroLED outperforms existing solutions by improved spectral engineering. This is especially impactful compared to CaAlSiN3:Eu2+ (‘CASN’), the most commonly used red phosphor which radiates a broad spectrum that extends to the far-red where the eye sensitivity is low. This means that adding CASN to the phosphor layer reduces LED efficiency notably. Moreover, CASN is significantly more expensive than yellow/green phosphors and performs poorly at high light intensities.
KSF (K2SiF6:Mn4+) offers much better efficiency at high CRI than CASN but fails to deliver that promise at modest color qualities (CRI 80-85). For these color qualities, the gain over state-of-the art LEDs possible with EuroLED is twice that of KSF. In addition, KSF is not suitable for high power applications and relies on a toxic synthesis process.
Quantum dots, on the other hand, offer good efficiency due to tunable narrow-band emission colors, but they lack stability and are not RoHS compliant, making them challenging to use in most LEDs.
Ready for partnerships
The patented EuroLED technology has been created with adaptability and customization in mind. EuroLED is a broad-based sensitization technology that also works beyond blue-excitable Eu3+. Reach out to see how we can collaborate to not only further tune this technology to your specific needs, but also discuss its seamless application into your products and large-scale production processes.
Seaborough is now ready to offer this groundbreaking technology to the market,
contact us if you have specific excitation and emission properties in mind!
Reach out to us and we will happily tell you all about it!
EuroLED is a proprietary nanoparticle engineering technology based on inter-particle energy transfer (IFRET), which was originally designed to sensitize Eu3+-doped phosphors in the blue spectral range. To achieve strong blue absorption, EuroLED utilizes a blue-absorbing sensitizer nanomaterial (e.g. Y3Al5O12:Ce, ‘YAG:Ce’) in combination with a Eu3+-doped emitter nanomaterial. When these materials are both small enough, and brought together closely enough, the sensitizer material can transfer its absorbed energy to the Eu3+-ions in the emitter material.
By itself, the process of non-radiative energy transfer between two types of ions is well-known and often used in conventional phosphors, to increase the effective excitation at a desired wavelength. In a conventional phosphor, however, both the sensitizer and emitter ions are placed in the same host lattice. Even though this approach can be successful, for Eu3+ there is no known host material where a practical blue-absorbing ion can be used within the same material. The reason is that interaction between two active ion species in most cases leads to unwanted metal-to-metal charge transfer quenching (CTQ) if sensitizer-emitter spacing is not carefully controlled. This is problematic to the point that the luminescence performance of the material almost vanishes.
EuroLED technology uses two different materials: one as sensitizer (absorber) and the other as emitter. Both are brought together in a carefully controlled manner so that the ion-ion distances are small enough to enable energy transfer, but large enough to prevent quenching. An additional advantage of our technology is that the materials can be chosen independently for each active ion, eliminating the usual trade-offs between absorption, emission, spectral shape tunability, and chemical properties which are all set by the host material.
