The Zeo-Light team of KU Leuven won second place in the global final of the I2P – Idea to Product competition in Austin, Texas, in which eighteen teams from universities pitched their technologies.
The aim of the competition is to encourage commercialisation of innovative products to that respond to a social or economic need. The Zeo-Light team previously won the European final in Aachen.
The Zeo-Light team have made a link between the luminescent properties of a material they developed at the KU Leuven and its use in increasing the efficiency of solar panels. The material converts the invisible ultraviolet portion of the light spectrum with a high efficiency to visible light.
Since the efficiency of solar cells is significantly lower for ultraviolet light than, for example, yellow or green light, the technology can be applied to make more efficient solar cells.
The Zeo-Light team is a multidisciplinary team consisting of members of the laboratory for photochemistry and spectroscopy (Lesley Pandey and Maarten Roeffaers), the Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis (Gert De Cremer) and KU Leuven Research & Development (Wim Fyen). Johan Hofkens, Bert Sels and Dirk De Vos supervised the work. The research team collaborated with the Belgian companies Novo Polymers and Light Technology, in the Laboratory of the Katholieke Hogeschool Sint-Lieven in Ghent.
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