- [Sandra] Good evening, and welcome everyone
to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
My name is Sandra Splinter BonDurant,
and I work here at the UW- Madison Biotechnology Center.
On behalf of the biotechnology center and our co-organizers,
the Wisconsin Public Television,
The Wisconsin Alumni Association, and UW-Extension,
we thank you for coming to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
And it is with great pleasure this evening
that I am able to introduce Trisha Andrew
and Marianne Fairbanks,
two researchers who weave their expertise together
from far different fields.
Tonight, we'll hear how these two
are developing a fabric
that can harness energy from the sun.
Trish Andrew is one of our Assistant Professors
in the Department of Chemistry and Material Engineering
here at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Trisha earned her BS at the University of Washington
and her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Trisha is a director of the UW
Nanostructured Spintronics Lab,
which strives to produce emerging electronic technologies
on unconventional substrates by using organic materials
to achieve unmatched control over processing.
Marianne Fairbanks is also an Assistant Professor
here at the UW Madison in the School of Human Ecology.
Marianne earned her BFA at the University of Michigan,
and her MFA at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.
She has shown her work nationally and internationally
in venues including the Museum of Art and Design
in New York City,
the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago,
and the Museum London in Ontario.
While working in Chicago, Marianne
also co-founded an experimental culture space
called "Mess Hall."
Marianne continues to produce new 2D and 3D work
for exhibition.
Please join me in welcoming Marianne Fairbanks
and Trisha Andrews this evening.
(applause)
- I love that this is called the Wednesday Nite @ The Lab
and I feel like a bit of an intruder, because really
for me it would be Wednesday Nite @ The Studio.
So I'm here to talk a little bit about my
entry into this collaboration and so
to begin, I'm an artist trained
in Fibers and Materials studies.
I explore intersections between the materiality processes
associated with textiles and sustainable design.
My formal training is in textile-based processes,
but my conceptional understanding of materials
and their meanings has often led me to do
more interactive and politically based work.
Working with others has allowed me to realize
projects more ambitious than I could've achieved alone,
and has enabled me to develop projects
for spaces outside my studio and audiences
beyond the art community.
Looking back at some of these early projects
and collaborations provides a bit of context
for how a solar textile, a current research project,
that marries sustainable energy, chemistry and textiles
has become the focus of my research.
One of my first explorations into alternative energy was
this project called, "Transform Transport,"
and it was an installation produced collaboratively
with Jane Palmer, under the moniker of "Jam."
The installation was conceived and created collaboratively,
but also required active participation
of the audience members to fully realize the work.
The gallery was located in the West Loop of Chicago,
in a neighborhood deep
with a rich history of unionized labor.
With this history in mind, we became interested
in how we can translate the collective labor of people power
into something immediate, visual, and poetic.
To do this, we adapted six bicycles to become stationary,
and each bike was rigged with several electric generators
kinda the old-school kind that still go on the back of your bike
and it attached to wires and small lights
suspended above and around the bikes.
The lights illuminated when people powered
rotation of the tires.
When one bike was ridden, many lights twinkled,
and if all six bikes were ridden simultaneously
the collective work of the riders created
a shimmering and brilliant constellation.
Jam continued to investigate alternative energy
in a public art exhibition in Columbus, Ohio
called, "Dispensing with Formalities."
We were asked to use this newspaper dispenser bin
as a space to locate distributable art.
With Jam's contribution called "Sunlight,"
we sought to distribute light.
To make this light dispenser self-contained
and capable of both collecting energy and distributing light
we reached out to a local solar engineer,
who helped us rig the dispenser
with solar panels and batteries.
Our hope was to distribute the immaterial
and perhaps provide light in a space that was unlit
like a sidewalk overlooked by the city.
Having completed two relatively simple
technology integrated alternative energy projects,
we were driven to do more.
Not only to better understand the technologies
but to explore the meaning we could plum
to develop conceptual projects around alternative energy.
After working with solar,
with a solar engineer who not only helped us create the work
but also taught us the basics of how to use
and collect solar energy,
we felt empowered to continue working with solar,
and found flexible thin-film solar panels
were on the market.
This led us to create this project called "Personal Power."
It was a project in which we embedded
flexible solar panels into garments and bags,
and in this case,
I like to call this the Michael Jackson Jacket,
but it was just a jacket that we found at the thrift store,
and so it was kinda low-tech the very first prototype
that we came up with and we sort of embedded these small
thin-film panels and covered them with clear vinyl
and hooked it up to a Game Boy®,
so that tells you a little bit about the electronics
we were dealing with at the time.
This project was politically motivated
and was developed around the time
of the run-up to the second Iraq War.
When we were thinking about
people power in a literal sense.
Feeling powerless in our country's decision making process,
we started talking about ways that we could bring power back
to the individual.
Because we felt that our war was driven,
this war was driven by our country's greed for oil,
we wondered about ways we could use solar power
on a scale that could enable each one of us
to be independent from the grid.
From our initial conceptual art project,
we realized that we wanted to sort of
push it further.
We showed these prototypes in a few places,
and people kept saying, "Where do we get this?
"How do we buy one?"
and we said, "What do you mean? It's art. We're artists."
But slowly we sort of thought about
how we could transition this into a product,
and that to maybe have its full conceptual stronghold
that we did need to manufacture it
and see if we could get it on the market.
So we decided to sort of shift our goal
into making wearable, portable alternative energy
widely available.
Our gal was literally to empower people.
To give them personal sources for power,
enabling them to disconnect from conventional sources,
and tap into a larger network of information
through their electronic devices.
We looked to integrate flexible solar panels
into garments, backpacks, and handbags
to create mobile power units for devices such as cell phones.
It was our hope that by integrating solar power
into items that people already use,
they might be more interested in using solar power
on a large scale.
To make this transition from art project
into manufactured product,
we partnered with the MBA students
at the University of Chicago in their School of Business.
Being two artists, we had no idea how to start a business,
but we knew how to make stuff.
So basically with that team, we were able
to develop a business plan and much like here,
we went through a course called "The New Venture Challenge."
I think there's something like this
here in the business school.
And so through that we crafted a formal business plan
and incorporated as a business called "Noon Solar,"
and this is one of our first lines
and this is our first website.
With Noon Solar, we sought to bridge the gap
between technology and fashion,
given the relatively high cost of technology and materials,
we set our sights on making this
a high-end product for an urban consumer,
targeting taste makers.
We had competitors addressing the sporting market,
but we were looking for a different kind of trendsetter,
and early adopter of technology, a fashionista,
and an eco-conscious consumer, who could use
his or her apparel to collect power.
Though we disbanded the company in 2010,
our design for incorporating solar panel
into the handbag and capturing the energy
was awarded a U.S. Patent in 2013.
To collect the sun's light energy,
we used a flexible, thin-film, photovoltaic panel.
While the thin-film panels were at the
that we integrated into Noon Solar bags
were at the cutting edge of the commercially available
solar technology in the early 2000s,
they still had rigidity and size limitation.
Ascetically, it was always a challenge
to figure out how to integrate the rectangular thin film
into the design of the bag.
I always dreamed of a solar conductive surface
that would cost less, could offer more flexibility
and that wouldn't have the size limitation.
What if the fabric itself could collect the sun's energy
and be seamlessly integrated it into the bags?
And so this was the question, sort of,
that I positioned when I first met Trisha.
So I will transfer to her.
- [Trisha] Can you hear me?
All right.
So you heard Marianne and
her dream to actually integrate power harvesting technology
into things that you wear or things that you carry.
And I think that is the ultimate first step
towards actually looking at a new energy future,
because you're divorcing yourself
from thinking about having to look to a wall outlet
in order to actually power your lives
and your electronics and you start small
or you start with a cell phone, you start with Fitbits®,
you start with something that is disposable,
and then eventually when you can kind of
mentally divorce yourself from
having to plug something in then you actually can transfer
human sociology into actually thinking
about different ways of generating power.
But all the examples that you see
apart from Marianne's own businesses,
are very clunky.
So effectively, it's a technique called, "patching."
You take something, you cut a hole into it,
and then you fill that hole with something that is rigid
because every electronic that you deal with
that you're used to dealing with is inflexible.
So think about an iWatch®.
It's just a watch strap with a hole in it,
and then you basically stuck a portable computer
in that square hole,
and that's all you're really able to do,
because electronics need a rigid background.
You can't bend them.
If you bend your phone, you break it.
And that's what I basically disagree with,
and specifically with energy harvesting techniques,
so when you look at, these are just a random collection,
non-exhaustive collection of Google images that you get
when you type in "Solar Fabric."
And you get these ridiculous images
of solar panels on a necklace,
You get some images from defunct companies
that never got off the ground.
And then you get a few interesting images,
for example, this is actually from a defunct DARPA
Defense Organization project trying to
disperse solar panels in active theatres of war.
And this is a real company that existed for a microsecond
that were trying to sell these solar tents to
again to the Department of Defense.
And I want to actually zoom in on that image
for a little while.
So you look at this and you say,
"Hey, there are kind of solar fabrics out there.
"Look at that. That's a solar tent."
Those are silicon solar panels that are kind of flexible
that are integrated into this tent material.
But notice what I told you before,
the only way to do that is to patch something in.
You cut a hole in a tent and you
patch in a flexible solar panel.
Why am I focusing on that?
Well, when you actually think about this tent material
this is some amazing ingenuity and manufacturing
and advances in textile manufacturing.
This is not a cotton fabric.
This is a polyester blend that has been highly engineered
to withstand gale force winds,
and that's what you want.
It's a tent, right.
It's a tent that's protecting you from the elements,
and protecting soldiers in very discrete conditions.
This is a flexible silicon solar panel,
but that has completely different technology.
I can take as an engineer a silicon solar panel
that you have, maybe on your rooftops on glass,
and make it, put it into a flexible plastic sheet,
but that doesn't mean that can actually withstand
gale force winds.
It means that it could withstand
a bending angle of 10 degrees.
When it could only withstand
a bending angle of zero degrees before.
That is a completely different set of mechanical stress.
that you're placing a tent in versus a silicon solar panel.
And this is what that image is here for.
So when you fold this tent up,
what you notice is that you actually can't quite roll it up
like you would this tent.
This tent without the silicon solar panels
fits in the backpack, the 80 pound backpack of a soldier,
of what a marine carries on his back.
You suddenly patch in a silicon solar cell
and you can't really stick that in his backpack anymore.
So you really proved a point,
but you haven't actually helped
progress the narrative of how to generate power
in remote locations easily, all right.
So why haven't people done that?
Obviously because well fabrics are tough.
Fabrics are rough on so many levels.
First, to the eye.
This is a weave pattern.
These are all scanning electron microscope images,
but this is a weave pattern that you can see
or even feel with your fingers.
So there's multiple levels of roughness
on a centimeter scale from just the weave of a fabric,
and then there's also multiple levels of possible roughness
within each fiber composing that fabric itself.
And what I'm not showing you here
is a further zoomed in image of that individual fiber
Depending on whether you have silk or cotton
there could be multiple levels of fuzziness
on, let's say, the nanometers scale
within that individual fiber itself.
And this is why you can't grow a solar cell
directly from the substrate, because you have to traverse
the roughness on a fiber level
to a collection of fibers then to the weave.
Right, that's ridiculous.
Well, we hope to tell you that it's not as ridiculous
as you would think.
And the answer to that is actually
to invoke a little bit of organic chemistry,
which you would never think to invoke
when you're trying to make a device.
But here we are.
So this is a technique that we use in my lab
that we call "Chemical Vapor Deposition."
In general that's a very common technique
in electronic's industry.
That's actually how you make thin films of silicon.
It's a chemical vapor deposition.
It's a very generic term.
What we're doing is actually conducting organic chemistry
in the vapor phase and that is not as common.
In fact, there's very few people who do that.
And so, I'm first gonna tell you about this reaction here.
The structures are small, because I don't want you
to get bogged down in too much chemistry,
but you basically start with a single structure like this
This is a liquid at room temperature,
and it's called, "EDOT" for Ethylenedioxythiophene,
and then if you add a reagent, iron trichloride,
to Ethylenedioxythiophene, you make something called,
"Polyethylenedioxythiophene or "PDOT."
So going from EDOT to PDOT was a
solution formulation reported in 1983.
This is a very, very, very well-known reaction.
Its kinetics are incredibly well understood.
The role of the iron trichloride catalyst
is really well understood,
as far as the chemistry's concerned,
completely worked out.
And also PDOT, how to make films of it,
different versions of it, is very well understood.
And PDOT is interesting here, because it has
the conductivity of copper.
So if you make a wire of PDOT,
if you're actually able to make a film of PDOT,
it has the same conductivity as a metal
in the wires in this building.
Okay, so PDOT was first made in the early 80s
because it was an organic metal.
So what we did, was basically take this very
very old chemistry and we said, "instead of doing it in
"solution" as most chemistry is conducted,
"we're going to do it in the vapor phase,
"and we're gonna do it in this chamber here."
So this is from my lab, and this is a schematic
of what's happening in this chamber itself.
The box is basically a vacuum.
The vacuum is a few tons of millitorrs, okay.
That's kinda what the vacuum you have in your fridge
when you shut the door.
And from the left, we're gonna introduce
the EDOT monomer in the vapor phase,
and then in the bottom of this vacuum chamber
we have a crucible where we have our
iron trichloride catalyst.
So it's the same two molecules
that we have from the solution polymerization.
Mono EDOT and the catalyst iron trichloride.
The only difference we're doing here is
we're not using solvent and we're actually introducing
a monomer in the vapor phase from the left.
And then were also heating up the catalyst from the bottom
and so in this center region, roughly speaking, here
the catalyst and the monomer vapors
are going to physically mix
This is simple math transport dynamics,
if anyone's a chemical engineer in the audience.
And in this mixing region, basically, we can stick
whatever substrate we want.
And because we form PDOT, based on this chemical reaction,
PDOT is a polymer as I mentioned.
Polymers are literally heavy.
And so even though you have a millitorr vacuum here
the polymers are just gonna coat everything in sight,
Since this is a very simple mass transport issue,
by controlling the degree the vacuum here,
you can actually control how far the polymer travels
before it adheres to a substrate, okay.
So what I really want to focus on
the advantages of this procedure
is that whatever substrate you stick in this mixing region,
we're gonna get something called "Conformal Deposition."
There's two kinds of depositions out there:
conformal and line of sight.
Line of sight means whatever it hits,
line of sight it sticks, right.
Conformal means kinda conforms to
whatever curvature of the substrate you put in there.
So here is again another SEM of,
I believe this is cotton, I'm not sure,
but it doesn't quite matter.
So this is a collection of five rows of cotton, let's say,
before deposition, and then this is the same sample.
Different set of fibers, I can't quite say it's the same,
but it's the same sample after deposition of PDOT
under the vacuum.
What you see is, you get a little bit of roughness
that's because we have our PDOT deposited on the surface,
but what you see is the PDOT conformally coats each one
of the fibers, and where there is an empty space
between the fibers, you don't see any polymer.
You follow the curvature of the fibers itself.
If there is a break in the fiber, you see that as well.
So whatever fabric sample we've put in this chamber,
in this mixing region,
we get completely conformal deposition
simply by putzing with a few knobs
and basically changing the monomer flow rate
and the vacuum of our chamber vacuum back here.
And so what you can end up doing is
get over those multiple levels of roughness
that I just told you would absolutely preclude
the formation of electronic substrates
or devices on a fabric substrate.
So here is some silk materials.
This is a larger scale hundred microns,
this is 20 microns,
so you can see the weave pattern.
Here's the individual fibers.
This is the sample before deposition.
This is a sample after PDOT deposition.
You can tell the difference,
it's kinda hard to tell, not even sure
if you can see the resolution, but
the coated samples, under normal light, looked blue,
because PDOT when you form a thick enough film,
actually looks very deep navy blue to the eye.
But you can also see the roughness here in the SEM.
But know, at the amazing level of control
that we have, and we're really not even trying that hard.
We have the PDOT that coats the fiber,
again conformally, but even when we have
the different woven patterns,
we're not even coating individual threads
and then weaving a pattern afterwards.
We have our pre-woven fabric substrate
and the PDOT, again, conformally coats
all of those weave patterns as well.
So we can effectively take a woven material
and deposit PDOT on it.
Why do I keep looking at PDOT?
Well, again, like I said, PDOT
is an organic metal.
It has the conductivity comparative
to that of metallic copper
and so just to kinda prove my point here
that we can actually use PDOT as an organic metal,
these are a collection of fibers that we got from Marianne,
so one of the advantages of working with a weaver
is that you get exposed.
I mean, you think about things like
what kind of fiber should I use
and she gave us a sample of these two materials
that are pineapple fabric and banana fabric
so pineapple fabric is the material
that forms the national uniform of the Philippines.
and these are both what she tells me
are bast fibers so they come from the leaves
of the pineapple and banana plants respectively.
And so you just dry the leaves and pull them apart,
make a fiber, and then you can weave some
very gauzy clothes out of them.
And what you're seeing here are
first optical microscope images
so you can kinda see the blue color everywhere
you see the slightly blue/green pattern
is because it looks slightly blue/green to the eye.
And these are some SEM's.
This is before deposition, this is after deposition.
To show you again the conformality of this process
and then these bottom two images here,
if you can't see the numbers,
they're basically Volt meter readings,
looking at the resistance of this one-inch sample
that you see in both of those images.
And these are one-inched square samples
of these banana or pineapple swatches cut out
and these are two alligator clips
that are traversing that one inch-square
and what you're seeing is a resistance value
of about 305 ohms.
If no one knows the resistance of a typical fabric,
it's so resistant that you really can't get a reading,
so it's above a few giga-ohms, okay.
So all of a sudden, just because of the PDOT coating,
we've actually made this textile conductive,
and it's so conductive
that if we actually coat a few fibers
and make a little yarn of it
connect it to a light bulb, we can actually
power a light bulb.
So that's what this picture is.
This right here, this black part
we're not really great photographers in my lab,
but this black part are banana fibers
that are actually passing enough current density
to power a normal, incandescent light bulb.
Well, it's not normal, it's a tiny light bulb
we found lying around in the basement
of the chemistry building.
Okay, so we used oCVD again,
to basically make textiles conductive,
so they can actually serve as a bottom substrate
as a bottom-conducting electrode
for whatever device that we grow on it.
Now, if we're talking about solars, solar cells,
we have to grow the rest of the device.
We just had the conductive substrate,
but now we actually need something to collect light
and convert light into power.
So let's talk about that bit.
So now we have a conductive base down here.
Sorry this is a bit repetitive,
so let's talk a little bit about what are
the solar collecting or photoactive layers
that we're gonna use in these devices.
So again, we need to think about flexibility.
We need to think about whether we can use silicon.
I suppose, because we still have a conductive material
we just need to do a little bit of formula rematching,
but we could use silicon, grow micro-crystals of silicon
on our fabric substrate now and make a solar cell that way.
But again we hit up that problem of flexibility
and how much you bend a material,
so silicon is very, very sensitive
to even micro-cracks in the system,
so even if you have a conductive fabric substrate,
if I grow silicon on it, first of all,
silcon is grown at about 400 degrees,
so my fabric is gonna burn,
but if I somehow got aroiund that chemically,
even if I grew silicon crystals from the ground up,
if I bent it more than 10 degrees,
it's going to become unusable again.
So even to think about our photoactive layers
and partly this is my own bias,
I like organic materials.
That's what my lab focuses on.
We use organic dyes as our photocollection layers
One of the dyes we use, one of my favorites,
unfortunately, we don't this a lot these days
to be perfectly honest with you, but this
is one of our old standbys is copper phthalocyanine
the structure shown there with a few missing bones,
but it's very, very famous
pervasive dye, because it used to be a blue pigment
largely for the car industry,
but you don't really see blue cars anymore.
Actually, I don't even see green cars anymore,
but that's an aside.
Anyways, it's still anything's that blue and plastic
has copper phthalocyanine as its pigment, okay.
Blue paint, wall paint, plastics,
and this is made at about 35 kilotons a year in 2012.
That number is about the same even in 2016.
It hasn't changed too much,
and elemental silicon is produced
I'm sorry copper phthalocyanine is produced
about 75 kilotons a year.
Silicon for electronics is only produced
in about 35 kilotons a year.
This dye is actually manufactured,
almost double the amount that silicon is used.
And the reason is you can actually
make this in one simple step from phthalic acid,
which you get from coal tar.
And so, it's a really very easy reaction to set up,
and so you can mass manufacture this.
Another common dye that we still use
in my lab very often is this structure shown here.
This is called, "PTCDI" or Perylene Diimide.
This is famously known as "Ferrari Red."
This is a picture of its powder,
and these are different solution images.
I didn't know that my students
were actually working with this to be honest with you.
I just found these images in our group camera
and you can see why they're a ton of fun to work with,
so these are just images of various solutions
of this material under room light.
They're so fluorescent that you can
actually see the fluorescence under
just normal fluorescent light bulbs.
But this is Ferrari Red and we use blue car paint, again.
And it turns out that when you think
about the science of these materials
when you actually make a thin-film of them.
I'm talking about 15 nanometers thick.
Single human hair is about 1,000 nanometers, right.
So very, very thin films.
When you think about a thin film,
the physics of these materials
actually are very similar to that of silicon.
That's how we can get away
with using organic pigments.
These are effectively molecular semi-conductors
and when I teach this in class,
you can actually make a direct analogy to
a unit cell of silicon, that's what's actually shown here,
to a unit cell of one of these dyes.
This is another blue pigment called, "Pentacene."
Silicon basically has a covalent bond
between two silicon atoms and Pentacene
or any organic semi-conductor,
you just have one extra step,
so instead of atom to crystal,
you go from atom to molecule to crystal.
So you just have an intervening molecular step.
And what you have is the bonds are
Van der Waals forces between the molecules
as opposed to covalent bonds between atoms.
And that weaker Van der Waals interaction between molecules
has one main advantage and one main disadvantage.
The disadvantage is that since it's a weaker bond,
you actually have higher resistivity or lower conductivity
in these systems,
but because this is a weaker bond,
you can actually make these films
on absolutely anything at room temperature.
And so obviously it's the advantage,
that we're gonna take use of in order to make solar fabric.
So you can make a ton of flexible devices.
This slide is a little bit busy.
Don't worry about the BAM structure here,
just focus on these two pictures.
These are another two sets of car paint pigments
This is a blue paint, this is actually
ink jet printer paint called "DBP".
This is American Red
instead of Ferrari Red.
This is actually a red dye that was discovered
at the University of Michigan and used
because of its proximity to Detroit in American red cars,
That's why it's called, "American Red."
But these are the two dyes that we use
that actually form a photodiode or a solar cell
and that's what this image is showing you here.
It actually functions as a solar cell,
And this is an image of my student's fingers
and the solar cell deposited on a flexible PET substrate.
So again, we can take these organics
and we can make them flexible,
but I told you can kinda do that with silicon as well.
There have been other people,
who've also made flexible plastic sheets,
using organic compounds,
but as I introduced this before to you,
fabrics are whole different degree
of mechanical instability than a simple flexible
plastic sheet.
I think I'm just gonna skip this first.
So let's think about how we,
Can we deposit these materials on fabric,
and the answer is "yes."
Otherwise, I wouldn't be here, right?
So it turned out it's actually pretty simple.
So this is another SEM.
The light images are where we have
our organic molecule and then the
dark images are actually just the background fabric itself
with some burn residue there.
I think my student went a little bit too hard core
with the electron gun or the SEM,
but these are some real-life images
fancy images that were taken by a photographer
for the alumni magazine and then
here's a schematic of what's happening here
and then again the SEM and
what I really want to focus on the SEM is
you don't really see a lot of difference
between the uncoated versus the coated fabric.
You don't really see a lot of crystal clustering
even at this 200 micron scale image here.
You don't see a lot of non-uniform coverage
that kinda jumps out to you in the eye,
and what this image is telling you is basically
that these organic photoactive molecules that we're using
are able to coat a very rough fabric substrate
without any breakage, all right.
So we can actually use these dyes
as we wish on a fabric substrate
so now we have our bottom-conductive base.
We can either use a copper fabric
or we could use the PDOT coated stuff
that I talked to you about before.
We have our photoactive materials
If we use organic compounds, they can actually also
coat the fabric itself.
And then on top, the last bit,
our last electrode that completes our device.
These squares here are a transparent metal
or a transparent material called, "Indium tin oxide."
We can also end up using some metal vapors,
like silver, and actually complete our device.
And I'm gonna give this over back to Marianne
to talk about our next venue of where we're gonna go
to think about a new manufacturing technique.
- When I showed up at Trisha's lab
I guess over a year ago now,
I brought a bunch of fabric, a bunch of textile swatches,
I brought my bags, I brought a bunch of samples
to try to convince Trisha that
I thought this was a good idea.
But in the end, what I was really hoping for
was that we wouldn't maybe just coat these textiles
with the process that she'd already developed on the paper,
but that perhaps we could weave them
from the ground up.
So I felt like that was the craziest idea
and I barely wanted to mention it,
cause I thought Trisha would think I was crazy.
But in the end, it seems that
there's a real potential for this,
and I think we're both really excited about this potential
and so, what could happen here
is what you're seeing in this image is this loom.
It's called a, "Thread Controller One" loom.
It's a new, digital technology in looms
that is related to the Jacquard loom.
So the Jacquard loom was made in 1805,
and it was based in a series of punch cards.
And so that technology has sort of existed,
and we all have cloth
that has been woven on something like this.
Anything that's sort of fancy or floral
has been woven on a Jacquard loom.
This technology has existed primarily for us
as an industrial technology,
something that's been manufactured,
that is apart from us as makers, or as weavers,
because we don't buy thousands of dollars
worth of equipment in looms.
I would say 12 to 15 years ago
this loom came on the market.
It's called the, "Thread Controller One."
It's made in Norway.
Invented by a woman named, "Vibeke Vestby,"
and what's exciting about this tool is
it's really a rapid prototyper for textiles,
and so as a researcher or as an artist,
people are now able to buy this loom.
When it first came on the market,
I think it was 80 to 100,000 dollars,
which is still very expensive.
But already in the last 12 years,
the price has come down significantly.
Right now we're using this original model,
which is called, "The Thread Controller One."
I've just received a grant to get something
called the, "Thread Controller Two,"
which is much improved from this version.
But what you're seeing here is a thread that has
individualized control of each and every thread that's there
So there's 1,760 threads
that I can design a weave structure for in a program
and send it to the computer,
Often people think that the loom then
just weaves it for you
and that's absolutely not the case here.
Okay, if I did it in an industry situation.
Yes, it would be weaving it for me.
In this case, I am physically still throwing
the weft back and forth.
I have control over the design.
I can change it immediately if it's not working.
And so with this loom, the idea is
when we get to the point where Trisha
can coat any of the threads and all of these
different components that she just talked to you about
that then we can weave the structure,
weave the panel from the ground up.
So we're not coating it anymore,
that we're building it through a woven process.
And so, this is sort of the future that we're hopeful about.
We have just started initial testing with this.
We have not gotten very far,
but this new loom that is coming on its way
hopefully very soon
will help us to realize this part of our research.
So we're very hopeful that
the manufacturing will maybe go in this way.
And so, this sort of shows some of our ideas about
how this cloth can come together.
So basically, what you're seeing here is
you just saw the components that are important for layering
in that first system.
but here what you're seeing is
that we would individually coat these threads
and then intersect them, whether it's in the warp of weft
to create a pattern, right.
And so when these conductive threads are intersecting
or when the coated, dye coated threads are intersecting
they're creating the device within the woven cloth itself
and so again, these are just mock ups of the idea
but the idea would be, maybe we weave a small unit
and then every 10 inches we can cut it
and that is the panel.
Maybe we're weaving whole bolts of 50 yards of cloth
and that is the panel that goes on a tent eventually.
And so it becomes really exciting to think about
sort of the implications for this.
I think one of the reasons that solar technology,
even back when we first used those flexible thin-film panels
I thought, "Oh, the price will come down.
"There's going to be radical change in this market
"really soon," and it's been 15 years probably
since we first made that sample.
And I would say that that technology is still
probably the most innovative technology
on the market today.
And so, being a part of something
that we can maybe transform the future of this
feels really exciting and so
we are hopeful that this will be the future
of textiles and the future of technology,
cause to make it flexible means
like Trisha was saying about the tent
that there's unlimited potential for where this could go.
Think of sails, think of tents, think of
anything that you can unfurl and ship
anywhere around the world for a very low cost
and so that's another goal of mine.
Finally, just as the design side of this,
I get really excited that because Trish and I
are collaborating,
there's certainly the scientific part
that has to come to fruition and be successful,
but the design part of it is really exciting to think about,
because I don't think these things
ever truly get developed simultaneously.
And so, if I can start thinking about
you know, my research involves looking at textiles
and the use of metallic threads in textile
in historic textiles.
Metallic threads, over time, have been very expensive,
so they're used very sparingly.
And so what are those designs,
and how are they efficient with those designs
and how can we think about sort of those past designs
and how that will feed into this
the future of this research?
And so, I think there's a design element
that feels really exciting as well that
these two things, the design and
the functionality, can grow simultaneously.
- Well, I'm actually up here mostly,
to thank the people who actually did the work here.
Just to explain this diagram a little bit more,
what I'm showing you here is this concept
where basically we have our conductive threads
and then the red and blue are supposed to be
the two, again dyes, that we put out here.
So the idea is we marry the two techniques
that I showed you before of using oCVD to make
something conductive, so that will be the gray fabric,
and then we just use our organic dyes,
that I also showed you before,
coat individual threads.
And so instead of having a pre-woven substrate
that we just coat the four layers on sequentially.
The idea here, the crazy idea here
is that we actually coat, we deconstruct,
the four components of a solar cell.
The two electrodes and the two photocollection layers
and actually coat them on four separate threads
and Marianne is actually gonna marry them
either in a very simple yarning technique here,
where we just literally twist everything together
and everywhere we have a twist intersecting
that's where we actually have
an electronic interface as well
or you actually marry it by a weaving pattern.
That's what shown here, where we have
these two are electrodes and in this case
the yellow, green, and the blue
are two photocollection layers
and so the solar cell basically
functions through this first electrode
down through the blue and then up back
to the second gray electrode here,
and that's what these two cartoons
are really showing you here.
And in this kind of scenario,
we're basically gonna be using metal threads.
This is where we've had the most success
and you actually think this kind of idea is crazy,
but to just go back here, where
in a very simple fashion, we just took a pre-woven substrate
and we just nanoscale coated our device over this.
If you actually--
I'm not really sure why I don't have these JV diagrams for you,
but if you actually just measure
the single, individual solar cell separately,
it works as a solar cell.
It's not very efficient now,
but you actually can convert sunlight
or white light into power with about 1% of efficiency,
and for comparison these materials
that we're working with on glass
so taking away this flexible textile substrate component
we should get about five or six percent efficiency.
So 1% is actually not that bad.
In the slide I skipped over actually.
Let me perhaps go back here.
So, these are not on textiles,
so this is some other work that
also happens in my labs.
So these are some flexible solar panels
that you see in the back.
Remember that I told you we're not great photographers.
So that's the flexible solar panel back there
and this is actually a PV array, and so,
this is one of them cut out.
So each one of these individual squares
is a single solar cell, and in this line,
this is effectively a kind of string of Christmas lights.
And so this is a line of series connected,
individual solar cells.
And the whole square is a mixture of series
and parallel-connected solar cells
and overall they make an array.
Similar to the big solar panels that you see
on your rooftops if you have them
or certainly by the traffic lights on University.
And the interesting things about these materials
again, the organics that we use.
I've shown in the still here,
so this picture's taken in my office,
and this again is a module over here,
and that's my student's hand, and
what you're seeing is a Volt Meter here
showing we can generate one Volt with this
array just under a room light.
And the reason I'm focusing on the room light bit
is when you have a silicon solar panel,
if you have a tiny photodetector, and you take it
and you expose it to just white light, even in an auditorium
you're not gonna manifest a photocurrent,
and that's because silicon is really good
at transporting electricity, but it's
really, really bad at collecting light.
And you need to actually have a particular angle,
and that's why solar cells are installed
the way that they are at an angle
in order to collect the most light,
and in fact, if you can also find some
flexible silicon panels on the market,
on niche markets like Amazon if you want too,
that allegedly charge your cell phone,
but the reason these kinds of technologies
are not widely used is because
if you actually take it out,
let's say on a normal Wisconsin winter day,
even if you unfurl the whole panel,
chances are 50-50 that you're actually going to generate
enough power to even power a Fitbit.
That's just because silicon solar cells
are not user friendly.
They don't actually collect light very well.
You need to have them delocalized in a particular way,
hitting sunlight at a particular angle,
and you need to have a little bit of focus light
from the sun in order to actually get a photocurrent.
We don't have any of those limitations with organics.
Another way to think about them is when you think about
just trying to dye something, forget the electronic part.
If you just want to make something colorful,
what do you use?
You use organic dyes.
Organic materials just collect energy,
light energy a lot better, they absorb it better, right.
So that's what this slide is really here to show you.
And I think this is a movie.
I forget what this shows you.
Other than my squealing voice,
which I actually have muted,
because you don't need to hear that.
But you can actually see.
Oh sorry, we're going to turn off the light
and you actually see the voltage-go weight
actually show you that we are manifesting
the light from just my office.
The fluorescent light in my office.
Ideally, where we're gonna go with this,
again, as Marianne introduced this concept to you.
Is we're gonna take these deconstructed threads,
the deconstructed solar cell,
and we're gonna weave it together,
and as opposed to this idea
where we just grow the solar cell array
on a piece of plastic and plastic can be
destroyed let's say.
We're also limited in the way
in the kinda array that we make over here
by my physical deposition equipment.
With this idea, when Marianne is actually gonna weave
a solar cell together.
We can actually, each one of these squares
forms a single cell, all right.
And so this fabric actually has
an order of magnitude more
solar cells present on it,
simply because at every intersection
we have an actual device,
compared to the one that I showed you on plastic.
And so this basically opens up so many more
venues for us to actually generate a
small-area, high-power piece of technology
that can give you power.
So I'm gonna end there.
It's a little bit early, but I'm happy to--
We're both happy to entertain questions,
but I just want to thank the people working on this,
especially this woman here, Lushuai Zhang.
She's just an amazing student,
and I just like everyone to know that.
She started this work about six months ago,
completely built our chambers, mastered the technique,
mastered a whole bunch of different chemistries
to make this solar array.
And I worked with this other woman here, Yuelin Peng,
whose hands you see in the background
of that movie, making the
plastic solar arrays.
But this has just been an amazing group of people
that I've had the fortune to cobble together.
And this is my lab.
And these people for giving us money
and thank you for your attention
and the invitation to talk here.
(applause)