Venugopal Koka

Mr Venugopal Koka, Director of Electrical Industrial and Lighting Marketing for SABIC's Innovative Plastics business – a leading, global supplier of engineering thermoplastics and a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), which ranks among the world's top petrochemical companies. Koka is responsible for overseeing the development of global solutions for SABIC's customers in the electrical and lighting industries. In an interview with MGS Architecture, Mr Koka divulged on the company's latest offering to the Indian lighting industry, going through transformative phase. Here are the excerpts:


What is SABIC's area of operation when it comes to lighting industry?
As the Indian government pushes for increased adoption of LEDs to reduce energy consumption, manufacturers are seeking high-performance materials that enable them to develop long-lasting LED lamps and fixtures that are more energy efficient than the technologies currently available.

Used in LED lighting to dissipate heat, heat sinks can have a tremendous effect on performance, but can also have an outsized impact on the cost per bulb by requiring secondary processes for housings. Lightweight hybrid aluminium/thermoplastic solutions are emerging as an attractive alternative to the conventional metal heat sinks as they exhibit high thermal conductivity but do not require expensive secondary processing.

We work with industry leaders in all parts of the LED lighting value chain and offer our technical expertise and experience with material solutions, design and application processing. At SABIC's technology center in Bangalore, we offer a full set of capabilities to serve the lighting industry, especially in design optimization and thermal management.

How will your expertise benefit Indian lighting industry? What solutions do you offer specifically for lighting industry?
LEDs generate light five times more efficiently than conventional incandescent lamps, but much of their input energy converts into heat that – if not managed – can detract from an LED's optimal useful lifetime. With the addition of two new PX13012 and PX11311U grades of KONDUIT™ compound, SABIC is bringing the solution that can enhance thermal management of LED lighting at a cost that helps them maintain a competitive edge. SABIC's range of thermally-conductive KONDUIT™ compounds can improve the longevity of LED lamps by efficiently conducting heat away from devices into the heat sink, and can also enhance design freedom by offering an alternative to metal components while keeping manufacturing costs down.

How will it affect the affordability of energy efficient lighting in India?
Energy Efficient Lighting
Lighting manufacturers are in constant pursuit of innovative materials and designs that reduce costs while maintaining design and performance integrity. We, at SABIC, work with our customers to help provide solutions that optimize the performance, life span and aesthetics of LED lighting for commercial, residential and outdoor lighting applications, while helping them drive down manufacturing costs.

A key challenge to mass-market adoption of LED bulbs is the higher purchase price. SABIC's material solutions can be a significant contributor to cost reduction. SABIC is catalysing these efforts with an expanded portfolio of materials for cost-efficient hybrid heat sinks, a component that is critical to the longevity of light-emitting diode (LED) lights. Benefiting from SABIC's LEXAN™ LUX resin with MAX Diffusion technology, Switch† Lighting developed an innovative, blow-moulded LED bulb, which provides uniform and consistent light output and enhanced omni-directional light quality at a more affordable price.

SABIC has recently collaborated with Intematix. How will this association help SABIC to improve the product quality and performance?
SABIC's Innovative Plastics business has collaborated with Intematix Corporation, a leading manufacturer of phosphor solutions for LED lighting, to create the ChromaLit Linear - a state-of-the-art LED offering developed for the lighting industry. By using Intematix's remote phosphor technology and SABIC's LEXAN™ LUX resins, lighting customers can now achieve the energy efficiency and reliability benefits of LEDs, while also experiencing increased optical efficiency and better light uniformity—a critical factor for commercial environments.

After Intematix, is there any further collaboration on cards? Please discuss.
Following Intematix's successful commercialization of the ChromaLit Linear, SABIC's Innovative Plastics business and Intematix will continue to collaborate on new technology developments to help enable lighting OEMs to take advantage of expanded remote phosphor solutions for solid-state lighting (SSL). The continued collaboration will allow Intematix and SABIC to further combine their complementary expertise driving the development of new applications, technologies and materials which can hasten and optimize the commercialization of new LED products, platforms and lighting applications.