Young Lighter of the Year
Cutting edge-lighting Young Lighter of the Year 2017 Matt Hanbury outlines his solution to the quest for an ultra-thin surface light source
its key limitations – improving the lighting performance and reducing the unit cost. In order to bring this technology to market I was presented with a new challenge. I had to found a company, Lightly Technologies, and so I moved from mechanical engineer to entrepreneur, and embraced all the new challenges that came with it. I brought in ex-Philips Lighting industry veteran Brian Charman as a co-founder and together we set about enabling a new generation of luminaire and lighting design. Approach to ultra-thin surface light sources The fundamental approach to developing our ultra-thin, surface LED light source module is in re-engineering the latest LCD displays technology to create a product for the lighting industry. However, this posed several major challenges for the engineering design. We set our technical specification very high: to exceed current OLED technology in every metric, including light output, efficacy, lifetime, beam control, uniformity, colour stability, thermal management, bezel width, thickness and module robustness, while ensuring wide compatibility with existing LED drivers and controls to ensure Dali dimming. We have achieved all of these specifications and are now at engineering design freeze and preparing final tooling for mass production. @sll100
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Some years ago, OLED lighting emerged as an exciting new development in modern light source technology. It was immediately recognised by the lighting industry for the unique, ultra-thin luminaire designs that it enabled in decorative, retail and hospitality lighting applications. OLED lighting was well received but was held back by the high unit cost and poor lighting performance. Luminaire designers waited patiently for these limitations to be solved. Fast-forward to 2018 and despite an industry-wide investment of $500m, OLED lighting is still not commercially viable. In fact the delta in cost and performance has only grown as LED technology continues to develop at a remarkable pace. In early 2016 I embarked on a mission to solve these limitations of OLED lighting. Fundamental to this was understanding that a paradigm shift was necessary – the market wanted an ultra-thin, surface light source, not a lighting module using OLED technology. By taking a step back and applying some out-of-the-box thinking I came up with the solution. Combining my experience working as a mechanical engineer at the Philips OLED factory in Germany and for Apple Inc on the LCD displays for the iPhone 6S in Japan, I invented a solution that uses LED technology to create a light module that has the appearance and form of OLED lighting, while solving