Additive manufacturing of indoor power generating devices (Phase I)

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The Functional Materials and Advanced Coatings Laboratory at the University of Calgary run by Professor Gregory Welch (Department of Chemistry) has developed a new materials system and processing platform to deliver flexible, lightweight, and semitransparent photovoltaic (PV) cells. The PV cells are constructed from organic materials and dyes derived from petrochemicals and are fabricated using roll-to-roll printing methods rendering the devices ultra low-cost (cents per watt) and allowing for localized manufacturing here in Alberta. Working with Innovate Calgary the technology is protected by 3 issued patents and 2 provisional patents. First point of use is for indoor light recycling where the PV cells are integrated with IoT sensors to use LED light emission to power the sensors - this is an emerging billion dollar industry and we aim to be the first SME in Canada producing PV cells for this application. Canadian partners can include the NRC, Institute for Printing and Graphics Communication, and Brilliant Matters. Technology is at TRL4 with fully printed PV prototypes developed and evaluated for performance and stability in a laboratory setting. Funding is requested to fund HQP to scale this technology (materials and cells) for circuit integration and on-site testing and further increase PV performance. Success of this project will lead to a HQP lead start-up company with commercial products expected within 3-years. Two HQP will be directly trained. Long-term objectives with continued investment and revenue will involve using our proprietary methods to develop solar PV windows for greenhouseapplications and rollable PV sheets for remote power generation.