Friday, October 18, 2013

Summer Experience-Research with Smart Lighting ERC

This post is in a series about RPI SWE members and their experiences in industry and research over the summer! Check out all the posts to learn more about what our members achieved this summer!

Research with Smart Lighting ERC
By: Kirthana Bhat, Chemical Engineering '16

This past summer I had a research internship at the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center (ERC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The core goal of the Smart Lighting ERC is to revolutionize lighting by creating the technology needed to produce benefits in human health and safety and energy conservation.

Along with two other visiting undergraduates, I spent the entire summer learning and researching the characterization of full spectrum phosphor LED’s. Phosphors are rare earth compounds that coat white LED’s which create a full spectrum of visible light, by emitting light at longer wavelengths. My research focused on the synthesis and characterization of narrow-line red phosphors. Since there are many ways to create these phosphors, my goal was to create a red phosphor using the best method to increase the performance of the phosphor.



The program ended with a symposium where I gave a presentation demonstrating the progress I made and a final overview of my summer research experience. You can view my poster here.This was a great experience and I highly recommend that everyone takes a chance to see if research is right for you!

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