Material and Textile Research Breakthroughs: Perovskite Solar Cells, Smart Cooling Textiles, and DIMS Myopia Control

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) Comprehensive Information Database · 04 Research Module A solar panel that generates electricity, a sportswear fabric that actively wicks sweat and cools the body, a spectacle lens that slows the progression of myopia in children — PolyU's research footprint extends well beyond aerospace. In energy materials, functional textiles and myopia-control optics, recent years have brought striking breakthroughs, two of which were published in Nature and Science respectively. This entry documents these "applied materials" research lines. For aerospace research see aerospace-program-overview.md; for an overview of PolyU's landmark research achievements see achievements.md; for the School of Fashion and Textiles see 01 Academics · School of Fashion and Textiles; for PolyU's knowledge transfer and technology licensing pathways see output-and-innovation.md. Sources are primarily PolyU press releases, research media and academic publications; all figures are attributed.

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# 1. Perovskite Solar Cells: A Record-Breaking Conversion Efficiency

# 1.1 The 33.89% Record

The core metric for any solar cell is power-conversion efficiency — how much sunlight is turned into electricity. Perovskite/silicon tandem cells are the leading frontier for pushing efficiency higher: conventional single-junction silicon cells have a theoretical efficiency ceiling of around 29% (near the Shockley–Queisser limit), whereas stacking a thin perovskite film atop a silicon cell captures short-wavelength light that silicon cannot use effectively, breaking through the single-junction theoretical ceiling.

According to an EurekAlert report on PolyU's achievement^※, the PolyU research team developed a tandem solar cell with a record efficiency of approximately 33.89% using a novel bilayer interface passivation strategy — overcoming a major obstacle in solar technology development. "Interface passivation," put simply, means introducing specially engineered coatings between material layers to reduce charge loss and recombination at the interfaces — akin to polishing the internal "connectors" of a battery so that current flows more smoothly with less loss.

According to the PolyU press release carried by EurekAlert, the work was led by Yin Jun, Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Physics. The specific technical approach embeds an ultra-thin, discretely distributed layer of lithium fluoride (LiF) at the perovskite/silicon interface, combined with the deposition of short-chain ethylenediamine diiodide (EDAI) molecules, simultaneously achieving both "field-effect passivation" and "chemical passivation" to reduce electron extraction losses and suppress non-radiative recombination. The results were announced on 23 May 2025 and published in the top journal 《Nature》(《自然》) (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07997-7). The research was conducted by PolyU together with LONGI Green Energy Technology and Soochow University — LONGI being a global leader in silicon wafers and photovoltaic modules. This industry-academia collaboration is itself a reflection of PolyU's "applied materials serving industry" orientation.

# 1.2 The 40% Target

According to public reporting, the PolyU team is pushing perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells toward commercialisation, with the ultimate goal of lifting efficiency from roughly 34% to the milestone of 40%.

# 1.3 Placing It on the Global Track: The Perovskite Tandem Race

PolyU's 33.89% is no isolated case; it is a record set on a track that multiple teams worldwide are racing on simultaneously. According to public reporting, on the same technical route, LONGI's own team subsequently set new world records several times in 2024–2025, verified independently by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) (reaching approximately 34.85% in April 2025), while companies such as Oxford PV are also pushing commercial mass production. This shows that perovskite/silicon tandem solar is among the most intensely contested races in global energy materials today. PolyU's contribution lies in the fundamental research breakthrough in interface passivation mechanisms, providing a reusable technical pathway for subsequent industry-scale manufacturing (objective background statement, not a judgement on PolyU versus industry peers).

Source strength: The 33.89% record, bilayer interface passivation mechanism, Yin Jun's leadership, the Nature publication and the LONGI/Soochow University collaboration are per the PolyU release carried by EurekAlert; the global race background figures come from public industry reporting, and individual numbers fluctuate with certification cycles — refer to each institution's current announcements.

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# 2. Functional Textiles: Smart Sweat-Wicking Sportswear

# 2.1 iActive™ and Omni-Cool-Dry™

PolyU's School of Fashion and Textiles (SFT) (see 01 Academics · School of Fashion and Textiles) has built a strong record in functional textiles. According to an Media OutReach report^※:

• iActive™ activewear series: features a root-like liquid delivery system and a skin-like structure for active sweat expulsion and heat dissipation, using biomimetic heat-resistant fabric to accelerate perspiration;
• Omni-Cool-Dry™ fabric: delivers ultra-fast sweat wicking, staying dry, breathable and comfortable all day under dynamic thermal conditions.

These "smart textiles" combine biomimicry, materials science and apparel design — not ordinary sportswear, but functional fabrics that "actively manage" sweat and temperature.

# 2.2 International Recognition and the Leading Scholar

PolyU's functional textile research has earned international recognition. The principal developer of the iActive™ and Omni-Cool-Dry™ series is Dahua Shou, Associate Professor in the School of Fashion and Textiles — concurrently a core member of PolyU's Research Institute for Intelligent Wearable Systems (RI-IWEAR) and a key figure in the Future Fashion and Textile Research Centre. According to the PolyU SFT website^※, Shou received the Distinguished Achievement Award from The Fiber Society in 2023, in recognition of his contributions to personal thermal and moisture management, intelligent wearables and soft robotics — underscoring PolyU's international standing in textile technology (echoing the smart textile research direction in 01 Academics · School of Fashion and Textiles).

Shou's team's cooling textiles did not appear overnight. According to a PolyU 2021 press release^※, as early as 2021 the team's "Sweatextile: a biomimetic one-way water-guiding sweat-wicking textile" had already won the TechConnect 2021 Global Innovation Award in the Advanced Textiles category — the principle being to mimic the skin's perspiration action, rapidly channelling excess sweat to the outer side of the fabric to form droplets that are expelled, while resisting the ingress of external liquids. At the same TechConnect edition, a further PolyU result in materials science — a "hydrofluoric-acid-free, rapid synthesis method for MXenes" developed by Professor Hao Jianhua's team — also won an award in the Materials and Manufacturing category, offering a more environmentally friendly synthesis route for applications such as energy storage and hydrogen production. This shows that iActive™/Omni-Cool-Dry™ are no isolated inventions; they are the product of a clear technical lineage — from Sweatextile in 2021, the textiles team continuously iterated and upgraded, arriving at the more mature commercial fabrics and the systematic Science paper of 2024–2025.

Source strength: iActive™/Omni-Cool-Dry™ per the Media OutReach report; The Fiber Society award per public sources.

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# 3. The Scientific Breakthrough in Smart Cooling Textiles: A Science Paper and Four Technologies

Extreme heat worldwide is becoming a public health issue. According to statistics cited in a PolyU press release (2025-09-15)^※, approximately 3.6 billion people worldwide are exposed to extreme heat risk, and heat-related deaths averaged around 480,000 per year between 2000 and 2019. It is against this backdrop that Dahua Shou's team integrated individual fabric achievements such as iActive™ and Omni-Cool-Dry™ into a systematic scientific framework of "personal cooling."

# 3.1 Landing in Science: One Paper, Four Technologies

According to PolyU SFT news^※, Shou's team published a review paper in the top journal 《Science》 on 28 August 2025, titled Sustainable personal cooling in a warming world. The paper systematically maps the team's own and global peers' technological deployments across the four cooling mechanisms of radiation, conduction, convection and evaporation, and for the first time proposes an AI-driven closed-loop system that connects sensing, prediction and actuation, allowing garments to self-regulate in real time in response to body temperature and environment.

The proprietary technologies presented by PolyU in the paper are as follows:

# 3.2 From the Laboratory to the Geneva Podium

The iActive™ and Omni-Cool-Dry™ series have won multiple awards at international invention exhibitions. According to public reporting, the series has captured the Gold Medal at the 2024 Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions and the 2025 Jury Commendation Gold Medal, along with a TechConnect Global Innovation Award. This is consistent with the "laboratory → invention exhibition → industry licensing" pathway typical of PolyU's knowledge transfer system (see the discussion of international invention exhibition hauls in output-and-innovation.md).

Source strength: The Science paper title, publication date, details of the four technologies and global heat statistics per the PolyU press release and SFT website news; Geneva and TechConnect awards per public reporting — for specific years and editions, refer back to the original announcements.

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# 4. Myopia-Control Optics: The Global Impact of DIMS Lenses

The myopia-control research of PolyU's School of Optometry is among the most globally influential achievements in its health sciences portfolio. According to multiple sources, the team's "Defocus Incorporated Multiple Segments (DIMS)" spectacle lenses:

The breakthrough of DIMS lies in its multi-zone optical design, which slows axial elongation in children wearing ordinary spectacles, simultaneously correcting vision and controlling myopia progression. According to the PolyU School of Optometry website, the series has been included in global optometry textbooks as evidence-based support for myopia control — a concrete example of PolyU's research landscape of "no medical school yet deep engagement in health/life sciences" (see achievements.md). The global attention DIMS has attracted is also directly related to the severity of myopia in East Asia: according to academic review literature, myopia prevalence among children and adolescents in Asia is already the highest in the world, with prevalence rates in China, Japan and South Korea all significantly above the global average — this is the real-world soil for PolyU's "Hong Kong original, world-facing" optical technology.

The path of DIMS from laboratory to the commercial product "MiYOSMART" also mirrors PolyU's overall knowledge transfer and technology licensing model (consultancy, collaborative research, technology licensing, spin-off companies; see output-and-innovation.md) — the commercial collaboration with HOYA is a concrete case of the "technology licensing" mode. One point of caution: media reports occasionally misattribute DIMS's commercialisation partner to "Essilor." According to official PolyU and HOYA materials, the exclusive technology partner for MiYOSMART is HOYA Vision Care; this document corrects the record accordingly.

# 4.1 Over a Decade of Collaboration and the 2026 Next-Generation Lens

The collaboration between PolyU's School of Optometry and HOYA began in 2012, with the two parties jointly developing DIMS technology based on defocus theory. According to a PolyU 2023 press release^※, HOYA donated HK$3.8 million worth of optometric equipment and lenses to the School of Optometry, supporting a two-year randomised controlled trial involving approximately 700 pairs of lenses and focused on children with rapid myopia progression, led by Professor Chea-su Kee, Head of the School of Optometry.

In 2026, the two parties launched the next-generation "Triple Enhanced Design (DIMS TED)" lens, marketed as "MiYOSMART iQ." According to public reporting^※, DIMS TED extends the recommended age down to 4 years old — the first time the DIMS series has verified myopia-control efficacy in children this young. According to clinical data presented at the 2026 annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) in the US, after 12 months of wear in children aged 7–12, the average control rates for spherical equivalent refraction (SER) and axial elongation were approximately 100% and 94% respectively — that is, on average "zero progression" in both degree and axial length, the highest control efficacy yet reported for the DIMS series.

Source strength: Clinical trial results and journal publication per Ophthalmology; commercialisation partner (HOYA), collaboration start year, HK$3.8 million donation and the 700-pair trial scale per official PolyU press releases; the 50+ countries/4 million children figures and the 2026 DIMS TED clinical data per public industry reporting and ARVO annual meeting disclosures — specific numbers update with statistical scope and year.

# 4.2 The Global Myopia-Management Lens Landscape: DIMS Is Not the Only Player

Myopia-management lenses are a fast-growing global business — according to public data from market research firms, the global myopia-control lens market was worth approximately US$15.53 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to about US$41.48 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of roughly 14.4% over 2025–2031. PolyU's DIMS/HOYA line competes on the same field as rivals such as France's Essilor:

The common reason DIMS's commercialisation partner is frequently misattributed to "Essilor" is likely precisely that Essilor's Stellest is the most directly competing product on the market against MiYOSMART, and the two are often reported side by side and confused — which is why this document corrects the misattribution at the start of Section 4. All three share the optical principle of peripheral defocus: the imaging at the lens periphery is deliberately positioned in front of the retina, thereby physiologically dampening the signal that drives the eyeball to elongate. The differentiating advantage of PolyU's DIMS with HOYA lies in the fewer number of micro-lenses, each of relatively larger size, a design which, per PolyU's early exposition, balances control efficacy with visual comfort and aesthetic naturalness (the special structure on the lens being less noticeable).

Source strength: Global market size and growth rate per public industry market research reports — specific figures vary with statistical scope and should be treated as order-of-magnitude reference only; competitor technology details (Stellest/MyoCare) per public industry reporting and manufacturer websites, not official PolyU statements, and this site does not endorse their efficacy.

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# 5. The Scholarly Thread in Materials: 2D Materials and Flexible Electronics

PolyU's applied materials research extends beyond "showcase flagship results" into sustained academic output:

# 5.1 Two-Dimensional Materials: A Little Twist Makes Materials Both Strong and Tough

According to an EurekAlert report on PolyU work^※, a team led by Professor Jiong Zhao of the Department of Applied Physics published research in the top journal 《Nature Materials》 on 18 July 2025, proposing a "twisting engineering" strategy that resolves a long-standing dilemma in two-dimensional materials — strength and toughness are usually mutually exclusive (the harder a material, the more brittle).

In terms of mechanism, the team rotationally stacked two layers of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) — such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) and tungsten disulfide (WS₂) — at a certain angle, creating a "misorientation" between the lattice orientations of the two layers. When a crack propagates through this twisted bilayer structure, the orientation mismatch generates interlocking crack paths; more critically, the crack edges spontaneously form stable grain-boundary structures through interlayer self-assembly, arresting stress concentration and continued crack growth — a process described as "crack self-healing" that consumes more energy than ordinary fracture and thus significantly enhances toughness without sacrificing strength. The team also found that the degree of toughness enhancement can be continuously tuned simply by adjusting the twist angle between the two layers. Such high-strength, high-toughness 2D materials are considered to have direct application potential in flexible electronics, high-power devices, wearables, optoelectronic devices, and energy conversion/quantum technologies — the same interdisciplinary band as the flexible wearable cooling technologies in Section 3.

Beyond Zhao's team, the Department of Applied Physics has sustained output on the optoelectronic properties of 2D materials: Professor Yuen Hong Tsang's team researches the nonlinear optical properties of materials such as graphene, WS₂ and MoS₂, applied in mode-locked/Q-switched lasers and photodetectors; Professor Ming Yang's team brings machine-learning methods to property prediction for 2D materials. Together these teams form the academic foundation of PolyU's cross-disciplinary work at the intersection of nanomaterials and optoelectronics.

# 5.2 Flexible/Stretchable Electronic Materials

PolyU's work on flexible electronics heavily overlaps with its textile and wearable research: stretchable conductive inks are used to print flexible circuits; liquid metals (such as EGaIn) embedded in elastomer substrates yield ultra-flexible conductors. One of the 2025 Second-Class Prize projects of the Ministry of Education's Outstanding Scientific Research Output Awards for Universities falls precisely in the frontier direction of flexible electronics (per the EurekAlert report on PolyU work; for a systematic overview of national award programmes see research-impact-and-international-network.md). The MXenes synthesis method from Professor Hao Jianhua's team mentioned in Section 2 is one of the material foundations of this direction — MXenes are a class of 2D materials with excellent conductivity that are readily processed into films, commonly used as candidate materials for flexible electrodes and energy storage devices. This direction belongs to the same "flexible + wearable" interdisciplinary band as SweatMD and soft robotic clothing in Section 3, reflecting a cross-college collaboration model among PolyU's materials science, textile science and electronic engineering.

Together with the perovskite solar cells, smart textiles and DIMS lenses, this scholarly thread shows that PolyU's materials science is no isolated case of a single "star achievement," but is supported by sustained academic output.

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# 6. Placing It in PolyU's "Applied Research" Landscape

Perovskite solar cells, functional textiles, cooling technology and myopia-control optics, alongside PolyU's other applied research, sketch a research character oriented toward industry and sustainability:

What these directions share is: each has a clear industrial or social application outlet. PolyU's research is not known for "pure theory" but for its character of "turning science into usable technologies, products and solutions" — a trait inherited from its industrial school origins. It is for this reason that PolyU's materials breakthroughs typically follow a dual-track path of "top-journal publication + industry licensing/commercialisation": perovskite solar connects with photovoltaic companies such as LONGI Green Energy, cooling textiles with the sportswear industry, DIMS lenses with HOYA, and the 2D material twisting engineering and MXenes synthesis with flexible electronics and energy storage industries — all four lines find corresponding modes within the knowledge transfer framework of output-and-innovation.md. It is also worth noting that the lead scholars across these four lines (Yin Jun, Dahua Shou, Chea-su Kee, Jiong Zhao and Jianhua Hao) belong to three different academic units — the Department of Applied Physics, the School of Fashion and Textiles, and the School of Optometry — showing that PolyU's "applied materials" research landscape is not supported by any single school, but rather a multi-school endeavour in which each unit achieves internationally leading results in its own niche.

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