The company completed several successful commercial plant trials with its UbiGro™ greenhouse film, highlighted in a new white paper and recognized by Frost & Sullivan as a first-of-its-kind product.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Nov. 6, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — UbiQD, Inc., a New Mexico-based advanced materials company, announced today it has been awarded the Frost & Sullivan New Product Innovation Award 2019 for its UbiGro™ luminescent greenhouse film, cited by the market research firm as the first product of its kind. Additionally, UbiQD has now publicly released completed commercial plant trial data in a new white paper demonstrating how the UbiGro™ film offers a payback time of less than a year for tomatoes and cannabis.
UbiQD’s quantum dot-enabled retrofit greenhouse film, UbiGro™, deployed above a row of tomatoes in a commercial greenhouse in New Mexico. Credit: UbiQD, Inc.
Installed above plants in a greenhouse, the luminescent UbiGro™ films absorb underutilized portions of sunlight—mainly ultraviolet (UV), blue, and green light—and convert the energy into orange and red light. In one plant trial, the UbiGro™ films boosted tomato yields in a commercial hydroponic greenhouse by 21% (by weight). At cannabis farms in California and Oregon, the films boosted production by 5% to 8% (weight) in studies involving more than 450 plants.
"We partnered with expert growers in their respective markets to validate the benefit of the UbiGro product, and these first studies illustrate their success," said Dr. Matt Bergren, UbiQD Chief Product Officer. "The pilots highlighted in the white paper also demonstrate the impact this product can have on the profitability for greenhouse farmers over the product's four-year lifespan. New pricing of $3 per square foot delivers on our commitment to a payback time of less than one grow season." The full text of the white paper can be downloaded at UbiGro.com.
According to the recent report by Frost & Sullivan, "quantum dots are ideal candidates for optimizing the light spectrum for plant growth systems because they can be easily tuned to any color by absorbing the energy and re-emitting the light in a different color, depending on the size of the particle. This advancement represents a huge disruption to traditional grow lighting solutions, such as LED fixtures." Read the full text of the award at UbiQD.com.
"We are very pleased to be recognized by the top-tier market research firm Frost & Sullivan for our product innovation," said Hunter McDaniel, UbiQD Founder and CEO. "We love seeing the potential to have a huge impact on controlled environment agriculture, it's an exciting new market for quantum dots."
Earlier this year the company announced a novel fiber-based version of UbiGro™, which can allow for improved light distribution in a thick canopy or vertical farm. UbiQD is leading the passive lighting revolution in controlled environment agriculture by enabling sustainability with advanced materials.
About UbiQD, Inc.
UbiQD is a nanotechnology company based in Los Alamos, New Mexico that manufactures safe, high-performance, quantum dots and greenhouse materials. Licensing technology developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, and Western Washington University, UbiQD envisions a future where quantum dots are ubiquitous in a wide spectrum of applications. For more information please visit UbiQD.com and UbiGro.com.
About Frost & Sullivan
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