The EC funded IMOLA project has realised its objective of demonstrating the feasibility of prototype OLED lighting modules, both rigid and flexible, for applications in the automotive industry. Its main aim was to develop a large-area OLED-based lighting module with built-in intelligent light management. Interesting applications are wall, ceiling and car dome lighting, where the light intensity can be adjusted uniformly or locally according to the time of the day or the position of a person, or even road lighting, where the light can follow a car.
The IMOLA glass OLED demonstrators perform very well and underwent a number of reliability and environmental tests applicable to the automotive industry which are continuing after the end of the project. The introduction of OLED glass in the rear light demonstrator allowed the reduction of its thickness to around 30% of that used by an LED luminaire and housing.
The flexible OLED demonstrator showed the benefits of form factor, but performance and reliability are not yet reaching requirements though further developments of this are ongoing in other projects for example Flex-o-Fab (http://www.flexofab.eu/).
Several exploitation benefits are foreseen for the IMOLA beneficiaries, in the areas of adhesives, production of copper skin, knowledge on the driver chip design, on panels and IC assembly and on EMC management. Also more demonstrators are available to show the benefits of OLED technology to the potential customers of the OLED consortium.