Description du projet
Une technologie de rupture pour des fibres intelligentes et flexibles
Le marché des tissus intelligents ouvre de vastes perspectives. Cependant, il reste largement inexploité principalement en raison des méthodes de production et des stratégies portant sur les fonctionnalités. Le projet SENFLEX, financé par l’UE, développera des prototypes à base de tissus intelligents dotés de fonctionnalités dérivées des fibres elles-mêmes. Il évaluera la faisabilité commerciale de la technologie et examinera le marché et la possibilité d’un passage à grande échelle pour plusieurs applications importantes. Il fournira également un plan d’affaires décrivant une stratégie de mise sur le marché, le potentiel commercial et l’approche de développement des produits. Les fibres seront faciles à fabriquer en grandes quantités et seront susceptibles d’être intégrées dans une large sélection de tissus. Le projet devrait poser les bases de tissus intelligents rentables et dotés de fonctionnalités avancées.
Objectif
"Smart fabrics remain a promising market opportunity, however one that has not lived up to its potential yet. One of the key issues with current smart fabrics lies in the production methods and the strategy to impart functionalities. These rely on the integration of meshes of rigid electronics, or arrays of conductive yarns on soft mats or tissues. This heavily affects the fabrication and connection, costs, robustness and user’s experience of current smart fabrics.
The SENFLEX project proposes a disruptive solution where the functionalities of smart fabrics come from fibers themselves. During his ERC Starting grant project ""FLOWTONICS"", the PI demonstrated that some thermoplastic elastomers could be co-drawn with other materials such as liquid metals, polymer nanocomposites or optical materials, into long functional fibers. He and his team could in particular develop truly smart and flexible fibers called SenFlex, that can be elastically deformed and sense the imposed mechanical constraints in unprecedented ways. SenFlex fibers are simple to fabricate at large scale and can be integrated in a variety of fabrics. They can also be imparted with novel robust and truly distributed sensing designs that require little electrical connections and exhibit low power consumption, paving the way towards smart fabrics with advanced functionalities at drastically reduced costs.
In the SENFLEX project, we will assess the commercial feasibility of SenFlex fibers that have the potential to disrupt the € 5 billion smart fabrics market. We will investigate the market and scalability of our technology for several key applications. Our final deliverables are large-scale prototypes with proven industrial scalability and a business plan that describes our go-to-market strategy, business potential and product development approach. The prototypes and business plan will be used to convince strategic partners and investors for the next step towards commercialization.
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Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-POC - Proof of Concept GrantInstitution d’accueil
1015 Lausanne
Suisse