How FIPEL Bulbs Work

General Electric first introduced fluorescent lamps at the 1939 New York World's Fair. They were immediately a hit with industries because the lamps had a long life and therefore cost less to install and maintain. But they weren't so popular with ordinary people because of that darn light buzz and the harsh light the lamps emitted [source: Adams]. Where does that come from?

Fluorescent lights basically are tubes filed with a mixture of an inert gas, such as argon, and some mercury. When electrical current is pumped into the tube, the electrons collide with the mercury atoms, exciting them and causing them to release ultraviolet light [source: Adams]. Material called phosphors, which lines the inside of the tube, converts the ultraviolet to visible light. The problem is that if left to its own devices, the current would keep rising in the tube to dangerous levels, until it tripped the circuit breaker in your house. A device called a ballast keeps that from happening, by creating a magnetic field that obstructs the flow of current just enough to keep you safe [source: Adams].

Particularly in older fluorescent light fixtures, the ballast's magnetic field has a tendency to cause an effect called magnetostriction. That means that the magnetic field actually squeezes the ballast's core, altering its shape slightly. That makes your fluorescent fixture squeak over and over, about 120 times per second [source: Adams]. You probably couldn't design an everyday technology to be more annoying. That's why it took a whole new technology to get around it.

Researchers at Wake Forest and Trinity didn't actually invent FIPEL technology-- the earliest paper on it seems to have been published by Austrian researchers in 1992 -- but their device is the first to turn it into a viable light source [source: Dillow, Grem, et al].

Instead of mercury or the filaments in old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, FIPEL lights contain multiple layers of polymers – plastic—imbued with an iridium compound and a small number of carbon nanotubes. The latter are cylindrical structures, built in laboratories that are as minuscule as 1/10,000th the diameter of a human hair! Compared to conventional materials, these nanomaterials have a lot of novel characteristics, such as increased strength, chemical reactivity and/or conductivity [source: European Commission]. When electrical current flows into the FIPEL tube, it stimulates it to produce light just as electrical current passing through mercury in a fluorescent tube does. That energy is filtered through the polymers to create light [sources: Dillow, Electronics Weekly].

Energywise, the FIPEL light is twice as energy-efficient as a CFL, about the same as a LED. But it doesn't have any caustic chemicals like the CFL which contains a small amount of mercury. And because it is plastic, the FIPEL is easy to recycle. The bulb has a lifetime of 25,000 to 50,000 hours, about the same as LED. Wake Forest physics professor David Carroll, who's the inventor, said he's had a bulb burning in his lab for a decade [source: Neal, Spector].

Researchers say that FIPEL lights can be manufactured to produce just about any color of visible light in the solar spectrum. As Carroll told the BBC, FIPEL lights are vastly superior in that regard to CFLs. "[CFLs] have a bluish, harsh tint to them," Carroll explained. "It is not really accommodating to the human eye; people complain of headaches and the reason is the spectral content of that light doesn't match the Sun -- our device can match the solar spectrum perfectly.

"We are brighter than one of these curlicue bulbs and I can give you any tint to that white light that you want," Carroll added [source: McGrath].

Additionally, because they're made of plastic, FIPEL lights can be molded into a wide variety of shapes -- from bulbs that fit into the old sockets designed for incandescent bulbs to large sheets or panels that could fit into the spaces above ceiling tiles and behind walls, so that a soft, unobtrusive light can be evenly spread throughout a room [source: Dillow].

As for cost, a management consultant for CeeLite said the manufactured FIPEL bulbs should cost less than LEDs but a little more than CFLs [source: Spector].

One critic questioned whether in fact FIPEL was actually a breakthrough, since warm white LEDs are already available (without the bluish tint) and CFLs have only a minuscule amount of mercury, too little to be much of an environmental hazard [source: Holloway]. But most of the reaction has been positive. The Web site Engadget, for example, called FIPEL the "super-bulb" [source: Cooper].