About Opportunity:

Energy efficiency is of increasing global importance for both ecological and economic reasons. The increasing awareness of the negative effects of global warming is not only motivating the development of renewable energy technologies, but also the search for efficient ways to reduce energy consumption. The latter is of particular importance due to the rising price of electrical energy. Street lighting, for example, costs c£500m per annum to power 7.5m homes in the UK, a figure which will increase substantially over the next few years. Cities and councils are trying to reduce both their costs and carbon footprint and have proposed some radical solutions such as switching off or dimming lights in some areas. This has obvious safety issues.

Conventional street lighting illumination sources suffer from a number of problems; short life-spans, low and/or poor quality light and light output and use of potentially harmful materials. Alternative solutions such as LED-based lamps have longer life-spans, emit better quality light and are more energy efficient, however they also have drawbacks. The main one is that current retrofit LED solutions for street illumination do not meet national and international standards. LED lamps installed in poles higher than 6m for instance fail to produce a footprint which complies with CIE, ISO and EN standards. They also suffer from poor thermal performance, have light output and efficiency issues.

The technology described here can be combined with LEDs to address these issues and produce uniformity of illuminanace and footprints of various defined diameter and shape.

Key Benefits:

• Uniformity of illumination
• Flexible and defined illumination footprint
• Energy savings
• Lower CO2 emissions
• Improved safety
• Conformance with national and international standards

Applications:

• Street lighting
• Optical wireless communications
• General illumination

IP Status:

The invention is protected by a UK patent application, priority date July 2016.

The university welcomes discussions with potential commercial licence or co-development partners.

About Opportunity:

It is estimated that companies around the world lose a total of $1.8 trillion annually (UK economy, £30 billion) due to counterfeited products. While counterfeiting imposes a challenge on every industry, the pharmaceutical and alcoholic beverage industry (e.g. Whisky producers) are affected most, since forged products can have life threatening implications. In fact, it is estimated that the deaths of up to one million people each year can be related to toxic or ineffective counterfeited drugs. Current product security features include raised printing, watermarks, micro-lettering, holograms and security inks. While these technologies contribute to the overall counterfeit resilience, the current security features are still often forged. Similarly, official documents such as passports or banknotes are prime candidates for counterfeiting. For example, in 2016, counterfeit Sterling bank notes with a face value £7.5 million were removed from circulation by the Bank of England, highlighting an ever-increasing need for sophisticated and counterfeit resilient security features.

Our distributed feedback membrane laser technology addresses this need and could become a widely applied and versatile security feature on valued documents or similar products. Due to their extreme mechanical flexibility, ultra-low weight and ultra-thin design, these membrane lasers can be applied to banknotes or other documents requiring authentication control to serve as unique security labels. Up to (10e15)n unique labels for (n different gain materials) can be created and read out using a simple contactless optical system. The specialist expertise and technology facilities needed to produce the lasers will make them almost impossible to counterfeit, rendering it a strong and reliable security feature. Furthermore, the high optical transparency of the membrane lasers, combined with their low thresholds and ultrathin design also allows their use as wearable security tags, even on contact lenses where they can complement biometric authentication with iris scans.

Key Benefits:

• Extremely flexible, ultrathin (< 500 nm) and ultralow weight (0.5 g/m2) membrane lasers
• Transferable to any object requiring authentication control (e.g. banknotes, passports, branded goods, pharmaceuticals, etc.)
• 10e15 unique barcode-like labels can be created
• High read-out stability under ambient conditions
• Straightforward contactless read out using a simple optical system
• High counterfeit resilience due to a sophisticated production procedure
• Uses low-cost mass-scale production via inkjet printing techniques and roll-to-roll processes

Applications:

• Banknotes
• Passports
• Branded goods
• Pharmeceuticals

IP Status:

The University filed UK Patent Application No. 1711097.4 on 10th July 2017 and has subsequently prepared EP and US national phase filings.