Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG is presenting innovative applications for the automotive industry at LOPEC, the leading international trade show for flexible, organic and printed electronics. Together with Heidelberg's InnovationLab, the company will be presenting printed sensors for battery monitoring and RECARO car seats at the end of March. Heidelberg had already set up its own business unit for the industrial development, manufacture, and sale of printed electronics for this growth market and also established production at the Wiesloch-Walldorf site. In the future, electronic components and sensors for digital applications, particularly from the healthcare and logistics sectors, as well as retail, or the automotive industry, will be produced here using state-of-the-art printing technology.
An international team of scientists have produced a fully woven smart textile display that integrates active electronic, sensing, energy and photonic functions. The functions are embedded directly into the fibres and yarns, which are manufactured using textile-based industrial processes. The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, say their approach could lead to applications that sound like sci-fi: curtains that are also TVs, energy-harvesting carpets, and interactive, self-powered clothing and fabrics.
Within the joint project LAOLA, which was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and has now been completed, large-area lighting applications with organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) on flexible substrates were to be developed. The project focused on ultra-thin glass, which offers advantages compared to plastic as a substrate due to its excellent barrier properties. At the Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology FEP (Dresden, Germany), the OLEDs were applied to the flexible glass using a roll-to-roll process. A surgical light designed using this process will be presented at LOPEC 2022, on 23 and 24 March 2022 in Munich, at the joint booth of the project coordinator Organic Electronics Saxony e.V. (OES).
