Roll-to-roll printed and assembled large area LED lighting element

Novel continuous and mass customizable light-emitting diode (LED) lighting foil system, capable to produce adequate lighting levels for general lighting, was designed, processed, and characterized. Lighting element substrate was processed by roll-to-roll (R2R) printing using silver ink and automatic bonding of LEDs and current regulators on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate using isotropic conductive adhesive (ICA). Demonstrator consisting of two basic lighting elements contained 98 LEDs and produced 860 lm when running with 25 mA operational current through the LEDs when using total electrical driving power of 8.4 W. Measured power conversion efficiency of the demonstrator was 31 % and efficacy 102 lm/W. Element produced 460 lx illumination level measured by an illumination level meter at element’s central axis at distance of 1 m. At a distance of 2 m, illumination level was 110 lx, respectively. Temperature measurements with T3Ster thermal characterization instrument showed that when driving LED with maximum nominal driving current of 100 mA, LED junction temperature was about 120 °C, when lighting element was in air in room temperature. Accelerated environmental stress tests consisting of 500 cycles from −40 … +80 °C in aging oven and 1000 h in +60 °C/95 % RH climate chamber were performed to test samples without any failures. In addition, over 700 bending cycles using 20 mm bending radius were performed to test samples without any failures, so bonding of LEDs were shown reliable according to these tests. Achieved results proved that thin, flexible, and large area high luminous flux lighting elements and systems can be processed based on plastic foil manufactured using R2R silver ink printing and R2R automatic bonding of LEDs and regulator components using ICA on that foil.