by Brianna Crandall — April 1, 2015—Emerging markets analysis firm NanoMarkets recently released a new report on “smart surfaces,” which the firm explains are “self-cleaning,” “self-repairing” and other surfaces that change their function or form in response to outside stimuli. NanoMarkets predicts the smart surfaces market will grow to around $13.5 billion by 2020 and scale to almost $30 billion in 2022.
Smart surfaces have attracted attention from the research and development (R&D) community for a decade and are now being commercialized, according to the report. Smart walls, floors, car bodies, and cell phone cases and other smart surfaces are rapidly emerging business opportunities, and this report shows where they will generate new business revenues in the construction, energy, transportation, medical, electronics and military/domestic security sectors.
According to the report, the biggest market for smart surfaces will come in the transportation sector, which will clock up $4.1 billion in revenues from smart surfaces in 2020 for products sold for cars, trucks, aircraft and marine vessels. Although there is much talk about smart windows in the automotive space, NanoMarkets sees the major opportunities emerging in smart self-repairing car bodies and smart surfaces on vehicles that provide superlative protection from corrosion and ice.
The construction industry will also spend $3.6 billion on smart surface products in 2020. About one-third of these revenues, NanoMarkets believes, will come from smart solar surfaces. These surfaces include both photovoltaic panels that are monolithically integrated into roofs and windows, and self-cleaning solar panels that can rid themselves of dust and dirt and thereby increase their energy conversion efficiency. Self-cleaning walls, windows and other surfaces are also expected to be money-spinners.
Since smart surfaces often require fine patterning to create their required functionality, the smart surfaces “revolution” may breathe new life into nano-manufacturing technologies such as dip-pen nanolithography (DPN) and nanoimprint lithography (NIL), which the report notes have been confined to application markets for at least a decade. In particular, DPN is expected to be of growing importance due to its low cost and relevant applications, which include biosensors, nanosensors, rapid prototyping and metamaterials.
The new Smart Surfaces Markets 2015-2022 report, which follows a January 2015 release on smart coatings markets, includes eight-year forecasts in both volume and value terms for each end-user sector, with breakouts for major types of smart surfaces such as self-cleaning surfaces, energy-generating surfaces, self-repairing surfaces, etc.
In addition, the report also assesses the R&D and marketing strategies of the leading firms that are active in the commercialization of smart coatings, such as 3M, BASF, Dow, General Motors, Johnson Controls, Saint-Gobain, Sherwin-Williams, Sunpartner, Toyota, Volkswagen and several others.
