Symposium BI2 : The Business of Materials Technology

In the last century, materials innovations, such as tires and semiconductors, have created many new industries and enabled novel products such as automobiles and electronics devices, which have changed how we live and work, and improved the quality of life. Today, with a growing and aging population and increasingly connected world, we are facing unparalleled societal challenges including pressing demands for food, land, energy and water, compelling needs to ensure cybersecurity and cyber-physical security, requirement for more effective and affordable healthcare, and the necessity to ensure environmental sustainability. These challenges require more innovations in new material discoveries, in cost-effective material processing, and in the integration of materials into devices and components. In this talk, the author will review the past successes of materials innovations, discuss the challenges we are facing today in materials innovations and commercialization, and share some thoughts about how to accelerate the process of bringing materials innovations to the market, ultimately providing novel solutions to societal challenges.

Innovation is the process of transforming knowledge into progress and prosperity, … and its origin has changed: Ground-breaking innovations are now often delivered by start-ups, … repositioning the goals of established corporate laboratories, … and requiring universities to train/prepare the new generation of innovators. In response, and to meet the growing student demand, universities such as MIT are transforming the process of innovation from haphazard art to systematic science, and are starting to share insights that can accelerate the progress of the innovation economy.

Rapidly developing markets such as green construction, energy harvesting and storage, advanced materials for aerospace, electronics, medical implants and environmental remediation are potential key applications for nanomaterials (NM). Impacts range from increased efficiency of energy harvesting or storage batteries to radical improvements in mechanical properties for construction materials. In addition, concerns of these markets such as scarcity of materials, cost, security of supply and negative environmental impact of older products could also be addressed by new nano-enabled materials.
During the ongoing FP7 EU project FutureNanoNeeds (FNN), the production, classification, hazard and environmental impact assessment of the next generation NMs prior to their widespread industrial use is studied. To guarantee a comprehensive perspective, concepts and approaches from several well-established contiguous domains will be integrated. Together, these tools will form the basis of a “value chain” regulatory process, which allows each NM to be assessed for different applications on the basis of available data and the specific exposure and life cycle concerns for that application. The main objective of this assessment is to identify specific areas of concern in the nanomaterial life cycle which can be relate to substantial release or exposure and hot spots where a transformation of the material is expected.
Within FNN, we synthesized a variety of NMs on the pilot plant scale with potential use in energy applications like battery technology, photovoltaic and thermoelectric purposes. Furthermore, we generated data sheets for all applications to gather information along the value chain during production, use and recycling. First, different kinds of potential materials were identified for each application and their technical properties were listed. The technology readiness level (TRL) of each material has been worked out using a timeline that is divided into laboratory-, pilot plant- and industrial-scale from today to 2030. Technology options like social and economic chances as well as limitations like risk potential, social risks and barriers to economic growth are considered. Finally, the overall TRL is estimated from today to 2030 for the materials, the process, the components, the assembly and the final product based on all available information.

The battery industry is burgeoning in recent years. innovation in this field leads to nearly 14,000 battery patents and applications published in US in 2015. Battery device is a complicated scientific and engineering system including cathode, anode, electrolytes, separator, binder, conductive additives, packaing, and etc. The advancement of each individual component and the improvement of battery assembly are contributing to the continued development of battery technologies nowadays. The management of battery IP portfolios inherits this complexicity from its technological perspective. Concurrent with the rapid development of the state-of-the-art battery technology, this talk addresses the strategies to manage the IP portfolio in battery industry.

This talk will cover the author’s experience and learnings of 12 years in the field of “innovation-based economic development”, as President and Executive Director of Oregon Nanoscience Institute, as an active angel investor primarily interested in materials science and related device technology companies, and as an Advisory Committee member for the National Science Foundation SBIR/STTR program. Topics covered will include the ONAMI funding process and company portfolio, university technology transfer and commercialization, early stage investing (what investors are looking for and what entrepreneurs and investors should know).

ONAMI’s mission is to accelerate research and commercialize technology via startup and spinout companies in order to extend the success of Oregon’s world-leading “Silicon Forest” technology cluster. ONAMI has so far received $59M in state investment and helped to approximately triple (from $9M/yr. to ~$30M/yr.) Oregon’s annual research volume in materials science and related devices. ONAMI’s commercialization “gap” fund has made $8.5 in grant and investment disbursements (as of June 2016), enabling over 40 portfolio companies to raise over $290M (~85% of which is private capital) in leveraged funding. ONAMI was awarded the State Science and Technology Best of Technology-Based Economic Development award for Commercialization of Research in 2012.

The term “commercialization of research” situates one in a position of technology push, whereas an investable (and later profitable) company must be in a position of market pull – meeting customers’ needs according to their points of view. Further, a founding technical team needs to expand into a full-fledged business team to cover the many things that are just as important and challenging as the technical work required to build a company. It is with these things in mind that ONAMI’s current suite of programs and policies was designed.

The global trend that the world is one big marketplace has led to an increase in competitiveness and faster innovation cycle times. In the past decade this accelerated the urge for many companies to increase collaborations with the outside world in the innovation process. This presentation will address the background of shared innovation; how it is organized at Holst Centre, and how it plays a role in commercializing research results. Two cases will be presented to showcase the importance and the need for multiparty collaborations. The first case shows how different companies need to be aligned to enable the change from glass substrates to flexible substrates in OLED lighting. The second case deals with the alignment of the needs of new flexible electronics products with the manufacturing industry.

Training world-class materials researchers in home-institutes and invention of the world-leading indigenous materials technologies are the major challenges especially for developing countries such as India. Bright students prefer to go to US for higher studies. There is an astonishing difference in the advancement of materials technology between developed and developing countries as it drains the economy of the latter. Present paper is an attempt to discuss these issues of India vis-á-vis US.
Today’s intense global competition in innovations in materials technology demands more investment of money. US invests about 3 % of its GDP while India less than 1%. Industry significantly leads in R & D investment in US compared to India as Indian companies’ production are dependent on imported technologies from the developed countries thereby purchasing, marketing and sales are more important departments than R & D. Thus, Indian industry needs no qualified scientists or engineers for R & D to develop original technology. On the other hand, it needs smart people for managing the business. All professors and scientists in academics/govt. laboratories in India are interested in publishing research papers instead of developing leading technologies/solving industry problems. Therefore, here is no movement of the people from industry to academia and vice-versa unlike US. The issues like quantity/quality of research papers/patents, scientific workforce density, number of world-leading institutes and earned Nobel prizes are marginally low in India compared to US. Low quality education system, uneven growth, shortage of qualified faculties/ infrastructure etc. are the issues here in training materials researchers. Freedom for innovation has lost due to rigid bureaucracy in India. Thus, not a single invention from India has become a house-hold name in the globe.
The Indian government should set-up a research ecosystem with generous funding such that a healthy competition amongst local industries can lead to development of own leading materials technologies to produce economical and superior goods instead of inviting MNCs under ‘Make in India’ campaign. Indian Industries should voluntarily quit the attitude of making products (using imported technologies) for profit only instead focus on development of own leading materials technologies to sell to the world. Indian science leaders should appropriately lead the scientific community. Indian people must adopt scientific temperament with the end of superstitious attitude and develop more as a rational society. These measures will certainly boost involvement of pool of available bright youngsters to take-up materials research as a career & will bring enthusiastic environment in development of own leading materials technologies.
These realistic data and personal concerns will be presented/discussed.
Author acknowledges DST, Govt. Of India for INSPIRE Faculty Award [IFA13-PH-73].
Ref: Nature 521 142 2015; Curr. Sci. 109 25 2015.

Disruptive technologies are usually characterised by universal, versatile applications, which change many aspects of our life simultaneously, penetrating every corner of our existence. In order to become disruptive, a new technology needs to offer not incremental, but dramatic, orders of magnitude improvements. Moreover, the more universal the technology, the better chances it has for broad base success. The Graphene Flagship has brought together universities, research centres and companies from most European Countries. At the end of the ramp-up phase significant progress has been made in taking graphene, related layered materials and hybrid systems from a state of raw potential to a point where they can revolutionize multiple industries. I will overview the progress done thus far and the future roadmap.

Molten salt reactor is one of the generation IV reactors with wide variety f options. The first succesful achievement of desigh and operation was made in ORNL with fluoride salt fuel in 1960th. Recently, after nuclear accident in Fukushima on 3.11 (11 th March, 2011), inherent safety and waste management performance of liquid fuel got attention from industry. However thereare challenges to find suitable material in high temperature, corrosive, radiation envirionment. Experience of MSRE (Molten Salt Reactor Experiment) gives one solution whish is for fluoride salt, thermal spectrum with U-Th fuel cycle. Recently other options are proposed such as; fast neutron without moderator, U-Pu-TRU waste-burning management, chloride based salts. This presentation gives possible issue for material R&D, especially based on operational environment and tries to propose a strategy to realize liquid fuel in the present nuclear engineering field.

Like electronics for the 20^th century, the field of photonics promises to positively impact people’s daily lives by revolutionizing visualization, communication, computation, and energy consumption in the 21^st century. Polymer materials are essential in photonic applications ranging from flat-display technologies to optical communications and optical computations. In this presentation, three examples of the technologies will be shown to illustrate innovations and commercialization of polymer materials in these areas. The key massage of this presentation is that a successful technology initiated from new ideas, materials designs, synthesis, and physical characterizations on specific properties which are focused on, to understand structure/property relationships and scale ups. Commercialization requires multiple-disciplinarily collaborations among chemists, physicists and engineers in working together. These three technologies presented here include compensation films for liquid crystal displays to increasing viewing angles, optical rotators for optical communications to prevent signal overlapping during transmittance, and high reflective index polymers for three-dimensional photonic crystals with a complete band gap. Two of them have been industrially commercialized and another one is in the development stage.

Multidisciplinary research has paved ways towards a new form of electronics which is not only flexible but also conformable and deformable; while ideally maintaining excellent electrical properties under strain. Known as ‘stretchable electronics’, they exhibit superior characteristics over hard printed circuit boards in the context of human body integration. The technology can give rise to unprecedented business opportunities in either existing markets, such as wearable health monitors or new markets like smart implants for prosthetic applications [1]. IDTechEx estimated that the market size for wearable devices, which stretchable electronics have significant competitive advantages, will approach $70 bn by 2025 [2].
Despite the promising market potential, the commercialization of stretchable electronics is ultimately hindered by the substrate used and related technical constraints. Considerable progress has been made in the selection of suitable materials for stretchable electrodes and the design of novel devices operating on and in the body [3][4][5]. However, research work is relatively underdeveloped in the realm of industrial fabrication and scale up of commercial products. Both conventional photolithography-based manufacturing processes and commonly used printing techniques (e.g. screen printing) are affected by the nature of substrate materials, consequently limiting the resulting resolution and yield. The main reason is that the known fabrication methods are optimized for rigid substrates, and therefore not directly applicable to elastomers.
Our research focus is on developing reliable and robust techniques to metallize micron size features on the aforementioned substrates for miniaturization, yet securing their mechanical compliance. With biomedical applications as end goals, we have selected polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as our base material, an inert and stretchable polymer that is cost effective, easy to process and most importantly, biocompatible. Our fabrication strategies exploit both conventional and state of art techniques. The former involves the modification of the photolithography process. The latter is an additive manufacturing method via Aerosol Jet Printing developed by Optomec. Our findings show that these methods, with their own pros and cons, can potentially be industrialized to produce the next generation of electronic devices. Also, the properties of PDMS are further engineered through combination with other functional materials in order to adapt to the manufacturing conditions, providing evidence of good scalability. This might lead to new commercialization opportunities of stretchable electronics, enabled by the proposed technology platforms.

[1] Science, vol. 327, no. 5973, pp. 1603–7, Mar. 2010.
[2] Wearable Technology 2015-2025: Technologies, Markets, Forecasts (IDTechEx)
[3] 2012 IEEE Sensors, 2012, pp. 1–4.
[4] Flex. Print. Electron 1, 025005 (2016)
[5] J. Appl. Phys., vol. 114, no. 8, p. 084505, 2013.

Merck Chemicals Ltd.* has been actively researching organic electronic materials since 2000 with the objectives to develop products that enable mass production of plastic electronic devices with new functionality which are not readily obtainable using existing silicon technologies. These programmes require multi-disciplinary innovation to develop many interrelated materials and processes in parallel to realize these step change technologies.

We demonstrate how the co-development of organic semiconductors, passive materials and formulations with process optimisation enable the manufacture of high performance OTFT arrays suitable for mass production of display backplanes and other circuit applications using polymeric organic semiconductor systems. These materials can be either printed or patterned using photolithographic process to fabricate commercially viable and stable OTFT’s device with charge carrier mobility greater than 2 cm²/Vs.

Key to the success of these developments are aspects of processability, device stability, manufacturing reproducibility and scale-up which are often overlooked in academic research programmes. These topics will be highlight in the presentation.

*A subsidiary of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany

The Lithium ion (Li-ion) battery industry has been growing exponentially since its initial inception in the late twentieth century. As battery materials evolve, the applications for Li-ion batteries have become even more diverse. To date, the main source of Li-ion battery use varies from consumer portable electronics to electric/hybrid electric vehicles. However, even with the continued rise of Li-ion battery development and commercialization, the recycling industry is lagging; approximately 95% of lithium-ion batteries are landfilled instead of recycled upon reaching end of life. Industrialized recycling processes are limited and only capable of recovering secondary raw materials, not suitable for direct reuse in new batteries. Most technologies are also reliant on high concentrations of cobalt to be profitable and intense battery sortation is necessary prior to processing. For this reason, it is critical that a new recycling process be commercialized that is capable of recovering more valuable materials at a higher efficiency. A new technology has been developed by the researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute which is capable of recovering LiNi_xMn_yCo_zO₂ cathode material from a hydrometallurgical process making the recycling system as a whole more economically viable. By implementing a flexible recycling system that is closed-loop, recycling of Li-ion batteries will become more prevalent saving millions of pounds of batteries from entering the waste stream each year. In order to commercialize the recycling technology, Battery Resourcers LLC was spined off.

The Institute of New Energy Shenzhen (INNOVA) was formally established and began operations in July 2013. It is a private, non-profit and international research institution based in the Shenzhen Special Economic Development area of the People’s Republic of China. INNOVA aims to provide innovative technology solutions to challenges that mankind faces, using high-tech tools ranging from clean energies, energy storage, sewage treatment and the internet of things. The Institute has assembled a team of experienced and respected technology experts from the U.S., Europe, Australia, Korea, and China. It places greatest emphasis on a unique symbiosis of technological innovation, business incubation and the infrastructure of product development and commercialization.
INNOVA initiates projects based on a combination of market potential and technical expertise. With its natural advantages in international resource integration, INNOVA both recruits and collaborates with global experts regardless of borders. INNOVA focuses on technologies with international competitiveness in new energy, energy conservation and environmental protection. Technologies that have a supporting function to new energy, energy conservation and environmental protection are also included, such as advanced materials manufacturing and intelligent network.
In its first three years, INNOVA has already incubated and co-founded six spin-off companies, which has demonstrated success in innovation efficiency and the value of a strong connection between capital and industry. Our portfolio includes high-performance graphene-silicon lithium batteries, high-end electromagnetic cooking systems, high-accuracy solar tracking systems and more.
With its strong research, industry and capital networks and world-class innovation resources both within China and abroad, INNOVA promotes the internationalization of R&D, the commercialization of technologies, and enhances the competitiveness of Chinese science and green technology around the world.

There are several techniques to study bulk physical properties of materials. However, very few techniques can probe local physical properties on surface on atomic level. Currently, techniques such as scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) are one of the most advanced techniques to study local physical properties on the surface. However, STM samples are prepared by in-situ cleavage of single crystals.
It limits STM usage to study thin films, which are not prepared in-situ with STM. Surface of thin films gets contaminated by moisture, hydrocarbons, etc.^{[ref. 01]} in ambient conditions making it incompetent for STM studies. Hence, we have designed an ultrathin (few nanometers) protective capping layer. It can be grown by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) on the top of thin film. It can be removed by moderate annealing in vacuum. It can preserve the surface of oxide thin films for several days. Hence it provides a novel path to study thin films by STM using “pseudo-in-situ” technique.

The successful synthesis, modification and assembly of different materials have generated great expectations and quest for solutions, for the future needs of the mankind.
Despite the large body of data available on the synthesis of inorganic nanostructures, the progress on their integration in practical technologies had been marginal so far. One of the major bottlenecks in transferring nanotechnology from the laboratories into industry is our limited ability to demonstrate scaled-up synthesis and the value addition in final products. For instance, feasibility of artificial photosynthesis driven by the development of large number of advanced water oxidation photocatalysts has been successfully demonstrated at the laboratory, however implementation of these concepts and materials into technologically relevant device structures beyond TRL 3 is currently hampered by several engineering challenges, such as scaling-up, modul desing, stability of device on the field and cost, associated with the complex interfacial (liquid-solid) processes and lack of PEC modules capable of operating under field conditions.
This talk will show how chemically processed structures open up new vistas of material properties for industrial applications, and lead to innovation generators based on fundmentally new physical, chemical and mechanical properties resulting from the reduction of micro-structural features by two to three orders of magnitude, when compared to current engineering materials.

History

infinityPV ApS is a Danish start-up company founded in 2014 by Frederik C. Krebs (CEO) along with 31 co-owners. infinityPV has no external funding partners and is owned equally by every co-owner. This makes infinityPV a company unlike most. It is a light structure that builds on being a movement of passionate individuals with a desire to follow the greatest ideas without any traditional boundaries. The operation is lean and the objective is to create a reliable and honest technology for a better world and for the service of people. The philosophy is to non-pretentiously focus on what matters through equality and to serve the end user well.

Technology

The core of infinityPV is printed electronics and in particular printed organic solar cells. infinityPV is based on several patents within the field of organic solar cells and holds a wide range of competencies in this area. We address a broad range of products ranging from solar panels over materials to characterization hardware. This product range springs from the academic roots of infinityPV, but is rapidly evolving. We intend to serve a board range of customers from universities, to businesses, to private individuals. Our general aim is to foster the development of printed organic electronics by introducing honest and innovative products to the market.

Competences

With 32 co-owners, where many have more than fifteen years’ experience within the field of PV science and technology, the set-up of infinityPV is unique. The co-owners cover the entire value chain for printed electronics products and provide the company with a broad range of knowledge and knowhow including chemists, material scientists, physicists, engineers, designers, electronics, technicians, printers, analysts, and administrators.