Design and prototyping of a family of OLED luminaires for indoor environmental applications: results from the ODALINE project

Results of the project ‘ODALINE’ (OLED Devices Application in Luminaires for Interior and Exterior lighting) are presented. A team of academic and industrial partners worked together to design and manufacture a family of OLED luminaires. The project went through the following phases: i) analysis of the state-of-the-art of OLED technology; ii) identification of scenarios and application fields for OLED-based lighting systems and definition of requirements and performances expected for each scenario; iii) definition of the concept of new OLED lighting systems and development of their preliminary design; iv) executive design and manufacturing of some prototypes. After the identification of the most suitable OLED unit and of the application scenarios, the concept of the new luminaires was conceived: the luminaires rely on a suitable aggregation of a base module (consisting of an array of 6 OLED units, measuring 30 cm ∗ 20 cm) to provide systems with enhanced properties in terms of high efficiency, high quality light and flexibility as the luminaires can be combined to respond to different lighting tasks for indoor environmental applications. Final output of the research project was the manufacturing of three prototypes: a suspended luminaire (6 basic modules), a free-standing luminaire (4 basic modules) and a task lighting luminaire (1 module). The power supply system, consistently with the general concept, was developed for a single module rather than for the whole luminaire. Its architecture was conceived to allow the control of the luminaire (switching on/off, dimming) through the DALI digital protocol. Furthermore, some secondary optics were conceived and designed to concentrate the Lambertian light output and to increase the utilization factor of the flux.