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Automotive
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Advancing the automotive industry
Many technological advancements create new problems as they are solving others. For example, increased functionality in an automobile increases the number of controls a driver must manage, risking safety via distraction.
More controls have to be included in a finite amount of space as close as possible to the view of the road, no small feat for modern automotive engineers.
Buttons and switches have given rise to touch screens, but again these require a driver to take eyes off the road. Mechanical switches are costly to engineer and tool up within limited usable real estate.
Smart surfaces, using conformable touch sensors with haptic feedback solve both the usability and manufacturability concerns facing automakers.
They, however require new material sets that not only perform the necessary electronic functionality, but do so on materials that can be easily designed into the elegant aesthetic environments most car buyers have come to expect.
The advantages of the deployment of these next-generation materials extends well beyond the drivers and passengers of these "vehicles of tomorrow" to the engineers designing them and the companies manufacturing them. Simpler, more cost-effective manufacturing techniques, including IME (In-Mold Electronics) will reduce labor while fewer wires and connectors reduce both cost and vehicle weight.
Melt ice and snow in minutes.
Optical cameras are becoming the technology of choice for collision avoidance, intrusion detection, security, inspection, and process control systems. Cameras can be used to detect precise objects and AI processing can create 3D environment maps in real time enabling drones to fly without collision and autonomous cars to discern a pedestrian from a bicyclist or even a pot hole from a guard rail. All of these systems, along with RADAR and LiDAR sensors, will need to remain active even in harsh weather, so keeping their field of view clear from ice, rain, and condensation is imperative. CHASM’s AgeNT transparent Nanotube Hybrid materials is the only commercially available transparent material capable of delivering the heat density required for these applications without
wires.
