Considering the commercial feasibility and the value transformation of the technology, we worked with industrial design students to do some scenario exploration and product development with our technology.
Our product is a light-emitting ball, which is hollow and transparent, filled with our light-emitting solution and certain nutrients, and the shell is made of PHB naturally degradable plastic. Due to the limited internal gas, our algal bacteria will die within a few days and stop glowing. The shell on the ordinary grass, after special material design, can achieve a month or so of complete degradation.
Reference: images from here
This product is suitable for atmospheric lighting in weddings/events/private villas. Imagine a scenario: The wedding needs to decorate the outdoor lawn, the existing LED lights need to be inserted into the ground one by one, and need to be pulled down one by one after the end of the activity, but if there is a small luminous ball that can be naturally degraded without recycling, it can continue to glow for several days, and there is no recycling, the grass will return to its original state after a month (and even the grass will be more lush).
Consider another scene: a water park at night, people wearing glowing bracelets, throwing glowing volleyballs on the water, children's swimming rings are glowing, and glowing ducklings float on the water. This is also a scenario that can be realized with our technology, where the water park at night has more to do.
In addition, the luminous ball can also be used as a marker for emergency rescue. For example, when firefighters go into the forest to look for missing tourists, they can drop the ball along the route of the mountain, so that they can quickly mark the route and do not need to be recycled, which is environmentally friendly. If the pellets are used up, the algae bacteria concentrate can also be poured into ordinary water and containers for culture due to the self-reproducing nature of the algae.
In addition to this degradable light bulb, other products can be produced from LAMPS that can be used in a wide range of Settings.
For example, our technology can be used in the roofs of public buildings such as stations/pavilions/corridors/flyovers, translucent shading roofs during the day and luminous lighting at night - new biological building material applications!
Ground signs in areas such as parks/green Spaces/exhibitions are also a possible scenario. Imagine a glowing road in a park that provides gentle ambient lighting at night and a sense of security for pedestrians in the dark.
Many wooden ancient buildings or areas near water have high requirements for electrical safety in lighting, and the risk of leakage fire or electric shock needs to be avoided as much as possible. Our technology is bioluminescence and does not present any fire/electric shock risk, so there is room for application in these scenarios as well.
In addition to these scenarios, such a novel and interesting bioluminescent material also has many design possibilities, in installation art, clothing design or experimental art, our technology has many application possibilities.
These two applications amplify the product benefits of biomaterials and combine the technical characteristics of LAMPS. This product makes our technology commercially viable and provides a promising value conversion path for this technology.
Considering the instability of algae organisms and the harsh requirements of the environment, we designed a portable and easy-to-use detection & maintenance equipment that can detect ambient temperature and humidity, luminescence intensity of algae and bacterial density, and reflect the data on the LED screen in real time. With this product, maintenance personnel can regularly test to determine whether the nutrient ratio in the liquid needs to be adjusted.
In the future, our projects can also be integrated into the concept of green city/green building. One possible application is algal fluid pipe walls, where algae can cover a building through a pipe, like a window rail, at the side of an indoor window, and the liquid in the entire pipe is circulated through an air pump in each room/floor. On the one hand, this circulating pipe can adjust the indoor temperature, on the other hand, because the indoor gas is dissolved in liquid, it can play the role of fresh air and air purification.
In addition, we have also established a partnership with the landscape design team "Algae Verse", which may lead to interesting and valuable algae landscape design projects in the future.
