It's reported that Purdue University researchers have found a way to reduce some of the cost of creating LED lighting, a find that could lead to more cost-efficient lighting.The research was reported in an article this month in the journal Applied Physical Letters. Timothy Sands, professor of materials engineering, and computer and electrical engineering, led the team that included graduate students Mark H. Oliver, Jeremy L. Schroeder, David A. Ewoldt, Isaac H. Wildeson, Robert Colby, Patrick R. Cantwell and Vijay Rawat, along with assistant professor Eric A. Stach.

Sands said LEDs are basically layers of gallium nitride and indium gallium nitride layered on a substrate, or platform. Current LEDs use sapphire as the platform.The team at Purdue found a way to use silicon, a much cheaper material, as that platform. As electricity is introduced to the LED, it glows and creates light. "We more or less stumbled upon a potential low-cost substrate for LEDs, Sapphire is expensive."

LEDs are along the same efficiency right now as compact fluorescent lights, the squiggly looking energy-efficient bulbs found in stores, and he believes they will soon be more efficient than the fluorescents. He said LEDs have surpassed incandescent bulbs already. "The real problem is finding a way to make them cheaper," Sands said. Sands estimated that if everyone switched today to LED lighting in their homes, it would cut electricity demand by about 10 percent.

In Sands' research, he said the next step is to make green LED lights more efficient. He said a high-quality white LED needs all the colors of LEDs to work properly. Green is the color giving researchers trouble. His team is working to create a pyramid-like structure that he believes could solve that problem.