CETEMMSA researches photovoltaic textiles
The DEPHOTEX booth at ITMA (22-29 September, Barcelona), will showcase car dashboards, pillows and jackets with the capability of generating clean, renewable, wearable and autonomous energy – which could also be applied to sportswear.
The international project DEPHOTEX, coordinated by Spanish Technological Centre CETEMMSA, develops photovoltaic textiles with properties inherent to fabrics, allowing low cost and industrially sustainable production of new textile products. The resulting product must have textile appearance and properties: flexibility, lightness, durability, resistance to water and dust.
The challenge for the future consists in achieving that the fabric itself turns to be photovoltaic, so that textiles generate clean, renewable, wearable and autonomous energy thanks to their sun exposure.
Coordinated by CETEMMSA and in the frame of the European Project DEPHOTEX which will finalise in autumn 2011, 15 entities from seven different countries have been carrying out research on photovoltaic textiles during the last three years. With a budget of EUR4.2 million, the prototypes that are being developed in DEPHOTEX have large areas of applications: automotive, sports, leisure, home and interiors, architecture.
