- [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)