Heating solutions
Private households account for almost a third of Germany’s energy consumption. And heating homes takes up most of that – it’s one of the country’s largest sources of CO2 emissions.
Conductive papers and conductive, transparent films from Louisenthal are resource-efficient and provide innovative alternatives or complements to traditional heating systems.
SmartFeel® conductive paper
Electricity is expected to become the primary source of energy for heating buildings. Along with heat pumps, electrical surface heating is an interesting alternative or complement to conventional systems. It is a very promising option because:
- The electricity is increasingly generated by renewable energy sources
- Stricter insulation standards will drastically reduce the need for heating
- Electrical surface heating with SmartFeel® can be combined with smart home technologies. In this way, warmth can be generated WHERE it is required and – thanks to its rapid reactivity – only WHEN it is needed.
SmartFeel® is a paper containing carbon fibres. To bring in an electrical current, a patented procedure is used by which parallel copper strips are embedded in the paper – in a similar way to security threads in a banknote.
This approach offers a multitude of advantages compared to other types of electrical surface heating:
- Extremely thin at < 0.2mm
- Lightweight at about 100g / m2
- Fast and cost-effective manufacturing with no need to add contact bars later to bring in electrical current
- Permeable to air and vapour
- 100% plastic-free
- Lower CO2 footprint
- Recyclable
With the advent of stricter insulation standards for residential buildings, heating that includes SmartFeel® provides a very promising and scalable alternative to other heating systems – especially as its investment costs are low compared to heat pumps. We are working together with leading companies in the heating and construction industries in order to provide complete solutions for electrical surface heating in walls, ceilings and floors.
SmartMesh® transparent and conductive film
Getting into your car on a cold winter’s day is just that bit nicer when you know it will keep the interior cosy for you. Carmakers and automotive suppliers are now leaning toward innovative surface heating technologies for roof linings, armrests, windscreens and other areas. With Louisenthal’s SmartMesh® technology, the comfort factor comes with an added bonus: it can save up to 20% of the car’s heating energy consumption. A key factor in efficient energy management – especially in electric cars.
And the technology’s not restricted to the automotive sector. SmartMesh® is ideal for use in many other applications – from aerospace to photovoltaics to glass façades and more.
Take a deep dive into SmartMesh® and see how it works.
Louisenthal’s SmartMesh® is a transparent metal mesh film for printed electronics, offering conductivity along with transparency – and we’re able to manufacture it on an industrial scale. With our R2R SmartMesh® technology, we deposit an extremely fine network (around 1-2µm wide) of metallic conductive paths onto a flexible, transparent foil.
SmartMesh is also resilient. It can easily withstand 100,000 bending cycles while maintaining the highest levels of conductivity. The network on the foil is invisible to the naked eye and is transparent with no moiré pattern. That means you could combine it with other applications such as ambient lighting – and win a competitive edge with an eye-catching design element in your car interior or other product.
And those aren’t the only benefits. You get cost-effective, high-precision manufacturing too. That’s because we have very large-scale R2R machines at Louisenthal – and because we don’t need to use expensive components like silver ink or carbon nano tubes (CNT).
Advantages of SmartMesh® surface heating in electrically driven cars
Here are just a few of the benefits of SmartMesh® for automotive interior heating solutions:
- It has a sheet resistance << 10 Ω/□ to allow for high heating power with available on-board voltages
- It can be installed right underneath the topmost layer of the interior part while remaining imperceptible to the eye as well as to touch
- Its transparency allows combination with other ambient lighting or LED applications underneath
- We can produce customised layouts consisting of transparent SmartMesh®, fully metallised bus bar connections and non-metallised isolating areas
- You have a choice of foils, including PET and PC
- Range of foil widths up to 1,000mm
The fact that SmartMesh® foils can be laminated between sheets of glass, or implemented in transparent plastic parts by back injection moulding, opens up tremendous application opportunities. In the automotive sector, these include defrosting headlights and windscreens as well as heating windows in caravans and commercial vehicles.
Want to know what SmartMesh can do for your application? Feel free to get in touch!
