 learnings will be discussed.
BASF Future Business: Turning Trends into New Businesses.
In addition to innovation activities carried out by BASF business units as well as the corporate R&D functions, BASF Future Business (BFB) pursues entirely new directions for growth through corporate venturing activity. As a global team, BFB identifies future business fields and scouts for relevant technology which fit these new areas. The talk will describe BFB's approach to scouting and strategy in the mega-trend fields of energy, electronics, health and environment.
Technology Transfer in Energy Materials.
Nanoscience research has led to major new discoveries in areas which are of interest for novel industrial applications, including electronics, health, energy etc. The transfer of exciting new results into economical products remains a challenge due to the immense investments needed and the substantial time to develop the technology. Several concepts, such as start-ups, joint research laboratories with international cooperations, public-private-partnerships etc., are being employed in many countries. In this talk, examples of technology transfer in the area of energy materials in Germany and, in particular the Karlsruhe region, will be presented.
In the last decade, nanotechnology has been an exponentially growing area of science and engineering showing increasing potential to transform a broad range of industries - from energy, sensing, agriculture and healthcare to computing - with promise of products that are engineered down to the level of individual atoms. This talk will focus on some of the main challenges nanotech start-ups face in turning laboratory inventions into valuable and marketable nanotech products. Important issues including environmental, health and safety concerns, mass-manufacturing, integrability, reliability, and intellectual property will be discussed with specific examples on nanotech start-ups in the field of renewable energy.
Mechanical Processing in Hydrogen Storage Research and Development.
The growing demand for energy and recent global climate changes call for new approaches to energy generation and storage. One of the possible ways to satisfy growing energy requirements is the conversion of solar energy into electricity. Thus, generated electricity can be immediately used to power a broad variety of tools and devices. It can also be stored in chemical form in hydrogen rich materials such as hydrides, composite materials or metal-organic frameworks. The latter approach—conversion of solar energy into materials with high hydrogen content such as oil and natural gas—is the way in which fossil fuels were formed in nature; of course that process took millions of years.Storing hydrogen in solids offers a unique opportunity for its convenient and safe use in automotive, portable, stationary and other applications. Unfortunately, none of the materials currently on the market satisfy the needs of end users, which explains the interest and investments into hydrogen storage related research and development. This presentation addresses an experimental approach which proved to be indispensable in basic and applied hydrogen storage R&D—the preparation and modification of hydrogen rich molecular and ionic materials at nano-level using high-energy mechanical milling. This approach, also know as mechanochemistry, has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the preparation of novel materials as well as the investigation of chemical transformations that can take place in solids under solvent-free conditions. Recent research suggests that the exact mechanism of mechanochemical processes should be determined on a case-by-case basis. It also appears that mechanochemical processes in solids can be driven by structural changes and high pressure, generated in the material during milling. The crystal structure, lattice energy, and chemical reactivity of materials involved may govern the magnitude of the energy input required for such processes to occur.
Nano-stuctured Composite Cathodes for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells.
Solid oxide fuel cells are one of the most desirable technologies for the efficient and clean conversion of energy stored in fuels into electricity. Now, world-wide effort is being given to SOFCS for their commercialization. High fabrication cost is recognized as one of main hurdles, and various approaches are under investigation to reduce the cost. Nano-structured composite cathodes are the most promising cathodes for improving cell performance, enhancing reliability and stability and reducing the fabrication cost. In this presentation, our researches on the properties and electrochemical performances of nano-structured cathodes will be introduced and discussed.
Cost-effective Aqueous Chemical Fabrication of Metal Oxide Quantum Rods and Dots Structures and Devices.
The need of low cost functional materials with optimized geometry, orientation, and aspect ratio combined with inexpensive large scale manufacturing methods will play a decisive role in the successful implementation of nanotech-based product and technology. However, fabricating and manufacturing large area of such functional materials remains a serious challenge. Novel smarter and cheaper fabrication techniques and, just as important, better fundamental knowledge and comprehensive understanding of materials and their syntheses as well as their properties using nanoscale phenomena such as quantum confinements to create multi-functional structures and devices is the key to success. Moreover, the necessity of materials development which is not limited to materials that can achieve their theoretical limits, but makes it possible to raise theoretical limits by changing the fundamental underlying physics and chemistry while keep the fabrication cost to a minimum is crucial.Materials nanotechnologies based on chemical fabrication approaches is one of the immediate answer to the enormous need for cost-effective new materials for energy, electronics, and health. R&D exploiting chemical nanoscience and nanotechnology has the greatest potential to efficiently contribute to such challenging goals. Indeed, the creation of new materials with higher performance and improved stability achieved by atomic, molecular and nanostructural design and control using unique nanoscale phenomena such as quantum confinements is the key. Such ideas will be illustrated and demonstrated on the modeling, design and fabrication of metal oxide quantum dots and quantum rods-based structures and devices and their applications for visible light-active metal oxide semiconductors for solar hydrogen generation, as well as for gas sensors, magnetic and optoelectronic devices.
Some Recent Experiences With Startup Companies in Materials.
This talk will review some of our recent experiences with materials-centric startup companies, including three detailed examples: one in photovoltaics; another in biomedical devices; and a third in solid state lighting. Thoughts on challenges and opportunities, some specific to the current economic climate, will be presented.
Nanotechnology Enabled Micro-Gas Chromatograph Analyzers.
Micro-gas chromatograph analyzers are being developed around the world for a host of applications ranging from detecting undesirable compounds in air for security and safety, process control in industry and energy, and sensing compounds in breath for health monitoring and diagnosis. Some drivers for their development include speed (down to seconds for security), cost (<$1000), size (cell phone size and smaller), energy consumption (< 10 J), decrease in gas sample volumes (to milliliters), and perhaps surprisingly, reduction in false positives (to less than 1 in 106). While normal scale gas chromatographs (GC) are a highly developed and exquisite technology, due to differing constraints applied to micro-gas chromatographs (μ~GC) such as speed and energy consumption as well as differing physical phenomena dominating at the microscale, simply reducing the size of a GC runs into significant problems, leading to far worse results for μ~GC than a GC. However, nanotechnology is being employed in creating high-speed, high-pressure microvalves and pumps in order to control and route fluids, in the preconcentrator with metal organic framework molecules that have over a 1000 m2 of area per gram, enabling highly specific gain in concentration of target molecules, and in micro-nano sensors based on carbon nanotubes (CNT’s). These technologies have now left the university laboratory and are now being commercialized by Cbana Laboratories, a small startup out of Illinois’s Research Park, and hopefully at least one large Fortune 500 company. By exploiting nanotechnology, we are now able to preconcentrate gaseous species to several hundred times their ambient concentration within seconds, inject and separate over 30 species in micromachined columns in less than 4 seconds, and detect species down to the parts per trillion levels, all in a microsystem. Thus, new applications and markets are now possible to be created, which could not happen with even state-of-the-art gas analyzers, thereby opening up new businesses and opportunities.
Synthesis of Highly-Specific Nanoparticles from the Gas Phase on the Pilot-Plant Scale.
Highly-specific nanoparticles provide promising properties for a large variety of applications as the size dependence of their properties allows to tailor materials for specific applications. Synthesis of nanoparticles can follow different routes, while wet-chemical synthesis usually ends up in materials grown by thermodynamic control, gas-phase processes enable for a kinetic control of nanoparticle formation. Therefore, this method is favored for the formation of metastable materials like doped nanoparticles and nanocomposites. Industrial nanoparticle production, however, is covered by flame processes as they enable cost-effective production with high throughput. The quality of the resulting materials is limited and often agglomerates with a broad size distribution are formed. Highly specific nanomaterials, however, are synthesisized in specific lab-scale reactors - often available in minute quantities. Therefore, subsequent processing steps cannot be studied and many nanomaterials that require sophisticated synthesis technologies have not yet found their way into practical applications.Based on our experience of lab-scale reactors, we designed a unique pilot-plant-scale particle synthesis plant enabling for three different synthesis routes using either a hot-wall reactor, a flame reactor or a plasma reactor. In these reactors the energy required for precursor decomposition is provided by either an electrical heat source, a flame, or a microwave-supported plasma. Depending on precursor and gas-phase composition, materials like metals, metal oxides or semiconductors are generated. The chemical composition of the nanoparticles can be adjusted to pure, doped, mixed and composite materials. Pressure, precursor concentration, and residence time can be varied over a wide range to fine-tune particle size and morphology. The facility generates passivated pure and doped silicon