The smart coatings industry is now facing some issues that seemed almost unfathomable up until recently. The sudden decline in oil prices has not only taken the steam out its energy efficiency story but threatens to curb the resurgent green tech sector where self-healing and self-cleaning coatings had viable applications. Throw in a slowing global economy and you get the sense that the industry needs to look at other growth options.  NanoMarkets believes that the emergent Internet-of-Things is an area that might drive demand for the types of smart and highly functional coatings that generate the high value product sales.

The solar panel industry now seems back on track following the boom-and-bust period. It's still a sector dominated by crystalline silicon, but the current upswing means that the search is on once more for materials platforms that improve the conversion efficiency of solar panels, and efforts have been rebooted to hone and ultimately commercialize these next-generation materials.

Some of them are close at hand, such as novel approaches to doping silicon panels. Meanwhile, the thin-film PV sector continues to seek success against entrenched c-Si; this could come from improvements to CdTe and CIGS, while other thin-film materials are beginning to receive serious commercial attention. The solar industry also is beginning to think out of the box with a slew of entirely new nanomaterials such as quantum dots, nanowires, nanotubes and graphene.

Here's a rundown of what we see emerging in next-gen solar PV materials

Generally speaking, NanoMarkets sees DSC-enabled BIPV applications likely inching closer to mass production levels toward the end of the decade, with the first commercial production of DSC modules coming within a five-year window from leading manufacturers such as Dyseol and 3GSolar. BIPV glass, the current hot-spot for DSC application, has channeled many investments and pilot efforts, particularly in Europe but with backing from Asian partners. Our latest analysis suggests the market for DSC-enabled BIPV glass will surge from just $1.3 million to more than $256 million in 2021.

Beyond BIPV, NanoMarkets recognizes other end market opportunities for DSC that could bear fruit with higher-efficiency technology that works in low/ambient light conditions. However, we feel these are still several years further out from being viable revenue streams, and well short of the scale promised by BIPV:

The environment has changed since NanoMarkets last published a report on silver inks and pastes. We think that current trends in silver inks and pastes markets will change the opportunities available to suppliers and shift their focus going forward.  

While silicon PV is currently king of the PV landscape, CIGS is a PV technology that has the potential to make significant inroads in the next several years.  While progress has been slow due to the complexity of co-depositing four elements to generate the material and the need for encapsulation of the moisture-sensitive product, the high efficiency of CIGS (near that of single crystal PV), coupled with the requirement for only small amounts of the raw materials, provides one of the few paths to beating current Si-based PV in terms of cost.  

Flexible glass seemed like a natural fit for the display industry, combining the impermeability of glass with the flexibility of plastic. In 2012 it appeared as though flexible and ultrathin glass companies were going to benefit from the explosion of touch screens in displays of all sizes.  Unfortunately, the market took a different turn.  Now suppliers of ultrathin and flexible glass are looking for applications beyond displays to bring in revenue in the next few years, and one of the places they are looking is in semiconductor packaging. – See more at: http://nanomarkets.net/articles/article/flexible-glass-firms-branch-into-new-applications#sthash.DB2IVY9d.dpuf

Metal meshes – previously not under serious consideration as transparent conductors (TCs) because of their lack of transparency – have now overcome their performance limitations and are seen as serious competition for ITO in several applications, especially those that require large panels for displays, lighting, or solar energy. Bringing metal meshes into larger displays can be a way for metal mesh manufacturers to increase their revenue streams, which now are constrained because the markets that they are chasing, such as touch screen sensors, are not very large.

Phosphors are critical to the future of LEDs because they address the quality of LED lighting in fundamental ways:

• Greater range of color – beyond combining blue LEDs with yellow phosphors to increase the quality of white light, there are opportunities for high-quality red phosphors to provide better color rendering.
• Improved efficacy and lower cost – existing phosphors have been able to provide LEDs with 100 percent greater increase in LED efficacy and a 50 to 200 percent decline in price, and new phosphor materials may be able to do even better.

These characteristics of phosphors can help expand markets where LEDs are already gaining market share, such as general illumination, and also markets where performance concerns or consumer perception has limited the penetration of LEDs. Phosphor firms have an opportunity to make money out of this situation not just because they are an important enabling technology for LEDs but because existing phosphors are not necessarily up to the task at hand.  Some applications will require new phosphor materials with better performance

The outlook for flexible glass has changed dramatically since NanoMarkets last issued a report on flexible glass in December 2012. At the time of that report, flexible glass looked poised for commercial success in the display market – Corning had just seriously launched Willow Glass, other glass suppliers were producing ever thinner glass, and rumors were rampant about bendable or curved displays coming from major OEMs. These displays were supposedly going to feature flexible cover glass.

Flexible glass seemed to be a natural fit for the mobile display market, and NanoMarkets and many others assumed that the first significant revenues for flexible glass would come from the table and mobile phone manufacturers. It looked in 2012 as though 2013 would be the year when that prediction would come to fruition. Obviously, that did not happen, even though the selling points for flexible glass – lighter weight and potentially low cost compared to rigid glass – look on the surface to be exactly what the mobile communications and computing sector needs as smart phones get bigger and tablets become more prevalent.