The project has stopped, awaiting continued funding from an as-yet-undetermined amount from JPL for the second stage, which Jayaraman said could be close to three times as much as the initial grant. Jayaraman said he has been planning with JPL and hopes approval for funding will come through by the end of the summer.

Once started, work should be completed in two to three years, he said. The final product would be a long sheet of polymer plastic, a form of plastic able to be molded, covered with ridges and bumps called features, and set in a frame that would change angles according to the sun’s movement throughout the day. The light captured through the features, Jayaraman said, will be focused into photovoltaic cells, which convert the sunlight directly into electrical energy as the cell’s electrons react to photons from the sun.

Jayaraman has worked at MSU for more than 30 years, but said this project, being sponsored and funded by NASA, was different.

“We could have NASA send the sheets in to space, but still sell them to local electricity companies on Earth to make use of,” Jayaraman said.

Jayaraman has plans for what he wants to do with the product once the research and production is done.

He hopes to, along with his partners in the JPL group, start his own company for producing and selling the lenses.

“I’ve worked with a lot of companies before but I’ve never had a project that got me excited enough to want to open my own business,” Jayaraman said.

Ian Gray, MSU’s vice president for research and graduate studies, said one of the goals of the university is to build up sponsored research projects.

“Basic research is enhanced by an intended outcome, as it really can address a problem,” Gray said. “It’s best to have a balance between research and business.”

This balancing act was started back at NASA, Tom Cwik, associate chief technologist for JPL, said.

“We’re always looking at new ideas and trying to improve our systems,” Cwik said. “With shuttles landing on Mars where there is a lot less solar energy to gather, we need to be more efficient in collecting it with not a lot of space.”

Jayaraman said he saw potential in the task.

“I know that solar energy is going to be big in the future,” Jayaraman said. “And with our plan of better cells and focused lenses, you’ll get more bang for your buck.”

While most solar lenses are flat across the surface and require a large number of cells to collect the energy, Jayaraman’s lenses covered with features will allow fewer and more powerful cells to be used instead.

With this increased efficiency, Jayaraman said he hopes to make a six-fold reduction in solar energy costs.

In September 2006, Jayaraman, a full-time technician, and John Mills, a chemical engineering doctoral student, started the project by making small-scale samples of the lenses.

Before creating an entire sheet of featured plastic, Jayaraman said they needed to test the success of keeping one feature uniform across a long strip of the plastic.

“We take little pellets of plastic and churn them together under high heat,” Jayaraman said. “They melt together and are then pushed through a die which flattens them into sheets. It goes through patterning rolls, finally, where it is cut down into features.”

Mills said the process is a bit like using Play-Doh models. Because of its large size, this machinery is stored in the MSU Foundation building, Jayaraman said.

The most difficult part of the job is keeping the features uniform as they spread across meters of plastic, Jayaraman said. If the features change at all, he said, the light won’t focus the same way.

After six months of work, Jayaraman presented several 3-foot-long lenses with one feature to NASA.

“NASA said it went well, which is really exciting,” Jayaraman said. “But they want to go right into much larger lenses with tons of features, while I’d like to take a step back and say ‘How good is this and what can we improve?’”

Tim Kelly, a chemical engineering senior, is one student who will be assisting Jayaraman.

Kelly just started training last week, but said he is already learning to figure out properties of the plastics and spot inconsistencies using a computer program.

“Right now I’m just practicing and researching what other companies are doing about the same thing,” Kelly said. “I should move up to the laser, which also reads the pieces for differences, next week.”

Jayaraman said it’s a valuable experience for the students.

“They all want to move on to the next phase quickly and ignore the black box that is the actual production of the lenses,” Jayaraman said. “But that is my black box.”