Last month DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department's research agency, invited proposals from robotics experts to build a "chemical robot" made from soft, flexible materials and capable of squeezing through gaps smaller than its regular dimensions.
These flexible, lightweight materials can be used as tents and similar structures that provide shelter and convert sunlight into electricity.
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While less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than conventional silicon-based photovoltaic panels, the great promise was that CIGS cells could be produced cheaper and deposited on glass, flexible metal or other materials.
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"Our new PSCs are made from plastic-like materials and are lightweight and flexible, " he said.
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In November, WinFlex, a wind-power company based in Kiryat Yam, Israel, received one of the most coveted prizes in the GE Ecomagination Challenge for developing a wind-turbine system that uses a light, flexible cloth sheets made out of composite materials as the rotor system for a wind turbine.
The current development of new alloys, notably one containing pure silver and some germanium, promises more flexible jewellery-making, and more resilient materials.
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It's currently being evaluated for emerging technologies such as flexible structural health monitoring systems, self-healing materials, and radiation-protective materials.
Further, as manufacturing moves toward a more information-intensive, automated, and flexible future, it is returning to the US. With new materials, new techniques and demands for mass-customization, manufacturing will increasingly rely on knowledge, design capabilities, innovation and research.
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The team of Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, KAIST has developed a high performance flexible all-solid-state battery, an essential energy source for flexible displays (see paper in Nano Letters: "Bendable Inorganic Thin-Film Battery for Fully Flexible Electronic Systems").
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Curtains need to be covered in flame retardant to prevent fire spread, for example, and certain other materials have chemicals added to them in order to make them more flexible, more rigid, or more rugged.
The material is an organic photovoltaic semiconductor (called rr-P3HT) which, unlike the metal or silicon-based materials used until now for such biotechnological interfaces, is soft, light, flexible and highly biocompatible and naturally sensitive to visible light.
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