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Dashboards without switches and buttons, flexible solar cells or medical diagnostics systems integrated in plastic products: "smart plastics", ones in which function is worked into the material, will help these potential applications become reality. The combination of plastics technology, mechatronics and design not only allows for new product ideas, but also opens up enormous market potential.

PlasticsToday Staff

April 26, 2011

2 Min Read
Get smart on smart plastics during new conference

Dashboards without switches and buttons, flexible solar cells or medical diagnostics systems integrated in plastic products: "smart plastics", ones in which function is worked into the material, will help these potential applications become reality. The combination of plastics technology, mechatronics and design not only allows for new product ideas, but also opens up enormous market potential.

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Smart plastics are helping to revolutionize product design. Here, capacitive circuits are invisible below a 3-D product surface.

How to leverage this potential with the help of new technologies will be the topic of discussions in the scope of a new event, the Smart Plastics Congress, scheduled for June 7-8 in Linz, Austria at the Ars Electronica Center. The organizer of the congress is the Smart Plastics Initiative, a group founded early this year with the goal of helping the region and companies in and around Linz become a sort of one-stop locale for intelligent electronic plastic products.

The conference language is English. It will begin in the evening of June 7 with a keynote by Niyazi Serdar Sariciftci, the director of the Institute for Organic Solar Cells at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz. The second day features an all-day program with talks and an open innovation workshop. The speakers will include Mathew Gardiner (Orobotics AEC-Future Lab, Austria), Jaap Lombaers (Holst Centre, Netherlands), Thomas Müller (Chair of Plastics Technologies, University of Erlangen, Germany), Roland Streule (Sefar Holding, Switzerland), Dirk Pophusen (Bayer MaterialScience, Germany) and Markus Riester (maris TechCon, Austria).

Speaking about the newly formed group as well as the event, Georg Steinbichler, senior VP of development technologies with injection molding machine manufacturer Engel and chairman of the event, commented, "Our aim is to promote cooperation between companies along the value-added chain in this field. After all, the opportunities and challenges that this discipline presents require very different fields of expertise, which should preferably be accessible to partners via an efficient network."

The event's entire program plus further information on the event and registration details will be available at www.smart-plastics.com from May 2 onwards; for now the site offers a map of Linz plus email addresses you can use to ask for more information.

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