Heavy rush and interesting insights regarding ultraviolet LEDs at ICULTA-2018

The conference’s organizers expected 150 registrations – finally more than 260 participants from 23 countries took part in the ICULTA-2018 – International Conference on UV LED Technologies & Applications 2018 in Berlin. This is a great success for the first-ever conference on ultraviolet (UV) light emitting diodes (LEDs) and their multiple applications. "We are more than satisfied that ICULTA with its wide range of high-quality contributions has received such great interest," explains Prof. Michael Kneissl, co-chair of the conference and head of the Joint Lab GaN Optoelectronics that is operated jointly by Ferdinand-Braun-Institut and TU Berlin. "We are particularly pleased about the high level of industry participation, as it shows how attractive UV LEDs meanwhile are for industrial applications. More than 60 percent of the ICULTA-2018 participants came from companies. The field of competence that was most strongly represented at the conference was UV LED devices, followed by applications in cleaning & disinfection, UV curing and medicine.

The aim of the conference was to bring together developers of UV LEDs and users from various application fields. "As we already did in our consortium 'Advanced UV for Life', we have succeeded here in doing so," affirms program committee chair Prof. Markus Weyers, head of the Materials Technology Department at Ferdinand-Braun-Institut. At the conference, users from a wide range of fields, from medicine and plant cultivation to analysis and sensor technology to plastics processing, intensively exchanged ideas. "These experts would otherwise probably have hardly met," adds Weyers. "Thus, many experienced this event as a great enrichment and took valuable impulses with them."

The 31 invited presentations and 33 contributed papers as well as the accompanying poster session dealt with advances in manufacturing technologies, current developments, applications and trends in UV LEDs. The Ferdinand Braun Institut (FBH) and its spin-off UVphotonics NT GmbH were represented with several (invited) talks and booths at the accompanying exhibition.

FBH closely entwined with the conference

ICULTA-2018 was jointly organized by ‘Advanced UV for Life’ and ‘International Ultraviolet Association’. The ‘Advanced UV for Life’ consortium brings together 50 partners from research and industry, managed by the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut. The local organization of the conference was completely taken over by the consortium coordination office located within FBH’s Science Management Department.

Best Poster Awards

The prizes for the three best posters were awarded to Hans Bethge from Leibniz Universität Hannover for “Design and fabrication of a microcontroller based wireless LED-research module for application in in vitro culture labs”, Naoto Yabuki from Asahi Kasei Corporation on “UV spectral sensitivities of escherichia coli and MS2 phage measured with UVC LED water disinfection module”, and Frank Mehnke from TU Berlin about “AlGaN-based UV LEDs with emission below 230 nm”.

Contacts