Ambient Trends’ automated rapid testing technology for photovoltaic modules was selected among 2,500 entries from 67 countries as a finalist in the NITI Aayog Mission-LiFE competition. The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) is a public policy think-tank agency of the government of India which serves to advance the nation’s economy. AT found that due to the high complexity, cost, and available technologies to address the extreme variability found in decommissioned modules (of even the same model), current-day testing schema does not support reuse or repair markets at scale and there are substantial gaps in knowledge and technology which hinder this important component of the photovoltaic circular economy. AT’s technology serves to address the mounting issue of photovoltaic waste through rapid testing and characterization of end-of-life PV modules, applying novel techniques for determining optimal automatable repair and enabling intelligent utility-scale reutilization. Estimates suggest that reutilization could meet up to one-third of PV demand over the next twenty-five years, while AT’s system also enables a long-term custodianship model for solar industry lifecycle management. Approximately 80% of the world’s global e-waste goes unaccounted for and the costs associated with ‘cleanup’ of improper disposal of PV modules will ultimately impact utility customers and the public. Even with zero-cost material recovery, preliminary financial modeling reveals a 442-times advantage over state-of-the-art material recovery value.
Category Archives: Manufacturing
Organic Materials Laboratory
Ambient Trends’ Organic Materials Laboratory makes plans to collaborate with researchers around the world to develop bio-based materials technologies suitable for surface and structure applications for the built environment.
Future development updates will be posted at omatlab.com
PCBs to FHEs – Flexible Electronics to Become Ubiquitous
The advancements enabled by the silicon revolution are reaching a new pivot point which finally breaks the discrete adjacency of the physical world and the digital world which fueled the productivity growth of the last several decades.
Sculpting everything from finance and trade to communications, and dramatically upsetting the human story of generations prior, the digital revolution to date has done so, largely through external interaction. The first computers were created to process inputs and deliver solutions for labor intensive calculations such as trajectories for missiles, encoding communications, or tabulating and drawing conclusions from large data sets such as the U.S. census. The integrated circuit, using a miniaturized lithographic process based upon technology developed nearly 200 years prior, has delivered this digital computing in a vastly-scalable format which now serves as a critical underlying infrastructure for nearly everything we do today. Gordon Moore’s observations promised exponential advancement, storage technologies reacted, data points from sensors and other input data sources became relevant in retrospect and even real-time, and data science was born.
Consider electronic ink surfaces and Bluetooth interfaces used in reusable luggage tags made by Rimowa, and being trialed by Lufthansa and Alaska Airlines; RFID tags used for inventory, tracking and access control, or chip-embedded EMV credit cards which have now replaced the majority of credit cards in your wallet.
Data no longer moves from static databases through processors to report a solution. Now, something happens in the real-time world and an immediate technology-provided response is becoming both ubiquitous and expected. Printing technologies are again being leveraged to replace the flat, minimally flexible glass-reinforced epoxy-based printed circuit boards used in the majority of electronic assemblies to create new flexible circuits on nearly any form or type of surface. Coined ‘flexible hybrid electronics’ (FHE), these flexible hybrid manufacturing techniques most often rely on thin silicon wafer based chips embedded onto flexible materials which may be applied to surfaces or embedded within objects. Implanted energy harvesting technologies and similarly flexible batteries enable sensor networks to independently react or transmit data passively with intelligent real-time responsiveness. Form factors range from temporary skin-adhered circuitry barely visible to the naked eye, to surface applications on critical components in transportation infrastructure such as airplane wings or bridges. Revenue from flexible electronics in 2016 is estimated at $8.6 billion, and is predicted by the market research firm IDTechEx to triple to $26.2 billion by 2020.
Industry groups including NextFlex and the DoD-backed FlexTech Alliance, serve as innovation hubs for advancement and implementation; both are based in San Jose, CA.