OTHER ELECTRONICS & NANOTECHNOLOGY
INDUSTRY UPDATE
July 2014
McIlvaine Company
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Sono-Tek
Announces New Cleanroom Laboratory Facility in China
Fermilab
& NIU Physics Project
U.S.
Department of Energy opens Flexlab
'Nanopixels'
Developed at Oxford
Energy
Research Facility Earns LEED Gold
IoT
Innovation Hub to Rise in Bangalore
Indian
Start-ups to Get Funding from Cisco
OCSiAl’s
Acquisition Creates World’s Largest Nanotechnology Company
Beginning August 2014, Sono-Tek will make available its first Class 10,000 rated cleanroom laboratory for customers to conduct testing using Sono-Tek coating equipment.
The facility is located in Guangzhou, China, and is operated by Sono-Tek's China Distributor, Unitak. The laboratory will primarily be focused toward Sono-Tek's medical device coating systems, such as stent and balloon catheter coating equipment; as well as many nano-research applications. Stated by Sono-Tek President, Steve Harshbarger, "The new China-based facility is our first cleanroom rated laboratory. The rapidly growing demand for high quality medical devices in China has made this a logical place for expansion of our worldwide laboratory capabilities. Sono-Tek already has a very large customer base in China for stent coating systems. This new site will allow China-based customers easy access to test our next generation stent and balloon coating machines, as well as our latest thin film coating equipment."
The initial focus of the agreement is for Haydale, with its range of nano materials and fictionalization capabilities, and the WCPC, with its extensive formulation skills and industry knowledge, to jointly produce a number of specifically targeted inks and coatings.
The WCPC will develop and refine commercial ink formulations provided by Haydale to meet the growing interest in graphene-based inks and coatings. The collaboration is also looking at the exploitation of functionalized graphene and other carbon nano-materials developed by Haydale in areas such as transparent conductive films, barrier coatings and 3D printing. Professor Tim Claypole, College of Engineering Swansea University and Director of Welsh Centre for Printing and Coatings, will lead the work on behalf of the WCPC.
The collaboration offers Haydale a unique opportunity for testing and further developing its functionalized materials for specific customer applications and target markets. The multi-disciplined staff working at WCPC includes many post-doctoral and PhD researchers from both industrial and academic backgrounds offering a wealth of expertise and capability to Haydale. Whilst Haydale has successfully developed fictionalization technology, it has been looking for ways to increase its offering of "intermediate products" as part of its longer term strategy.
Ray Gibbs, CEO at Haydale, comments, "Working with the WCPC is a key element of our focus on inks and coatings and is a great fit for us. Having access to a wide range of nano materials and then using our unique fictionalization process means we can provide the most appropriate material for the WCPC to use. In turn with the resources and capability at the WCPC means we can move quickly on product development. We have already successfully produced a consistent quality conductive ink that we are now starting to market. This collaboration is all about taking the next step towards the commercial uptake of our inks by demonstrating that we can successfully functionalize the right material to meet specific manufacturing needs."
Prof Tim Claypole, founder and director of the WCPC, Swansea University, added: "This is a good example of where the expertise and facilities of the WCPC, which have been developed with the support of the Welsh Government Academic Expertise for Business (A4B) program, help a leading edge Welsh company grow its highly innovative product portfolio."
"A crucial part of this project is the development of standard operating procedures for the manufacturing process that will ensure a highly consistent, quality product. These will form the basis for any future scale up to commercial production. This understanding of the manufacturing tolerances for critical parameters will also be fed into International Standards."
"The WCPC will further benefit from this project as it will have an improved understanding of the operating and quality assurance procedures. It will then be able to apply these to research into the creation of inks and coatings based on other novel materials".
An upcoming high profile experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is already proving to be a boon for Northern Illinois University students in physics and engineering.
On July 26, Fermilab moved a 50-ft.-wide superconducting electromagnet across its campus to a newly constructed experimental building. Made of steel, aluminum, and superconducting wire, the magnet is easily the largest component of a machine that will be used in the Muon g-2 experiment, involving scientists and engineers from 26 institutions around the world.
The scientists aim to study the properties of the mysterious muon. A better understanding of the subatomic particle could lead to discovery of new physics and unknown particles that form the most basic building blocks of nature.
While most of the Muon g-2 machine was disassembled and brought to Fermilab in trucks, the 700-ton circular electromagnet had to be transported in one piece from its original home at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. It arrived last year with much fanfare, rolling down a closed-off Reagan Memorial Tollway, and has been in storage while its new home was constructed.
With the building now complete, scientists and engineers will reassemble and fine tune the muon machine, also known as the g-2 particle storage ring. NIU research professors and nearly 20 physics and engineering students played a significant role in preparations, and students also will be helping with the reassembly.
Once the experiment is up and running in 2016, student researchers will help with quality control, equipment monitoring and data analyses. Some will base their master’s theses and dissertations on Muon g-2 discoveries.
While Shenk, McEvoy, and several other NIU students have been stationed at Fermilab this summer, NIU senior Octavio Escalante-Aguirre of Aurora traveled to Naples, Italy. There he is working with scientists on calibration of the experiment’s calorimeters, which measure the energy of particles.
So what are muons, anyway? And why are scientists and students so excited about the particles?
Outside of physicists, most people are unfamiliar with muons. But these particles are plentiful in the universe, says NIU Physics Professor Michael Eads, who leads NIU’s contingent on Muon g-2.
“For example, muons are created when cosmic rays strike our upper atmosphere,” Eads says. “As a result, we are hit by muons all the time—several every second.”
Like its lighter sibling the electron, the muon acts like a spinning magnet, and scientists are interested in its wobble. The parameter known as “g” indicates how strong the magnet is and the rate of its gyration. The value of g is slightly larger than 2, hence the name of the experiment.
A Brookhaven experiment that concluded in 2001 produced a surprise. Its measurement of the muon’s wobble didn’t match what is predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. That could be big news in the physics world, where mathematical precision reigns. But the margin of error for that experiment couldn’t provide definitive proof of a deviation.
The Standard Model’s muon g-2 value is one of the most well defined measurements in physics — a single number that nearly every physics theory has required as a baseline. The new Muon g-2 experiment will have four times more precision than its Brookhaven counterpart. If Fermilab discovers a value different from the Standard Model prediction, it could usher in a new era of particle physics.
Eads notes that Einstein’s theory of special relativity plays a role in scientists’ ability to study the short-lived muon, which has a life span of just two microseconds, or two millionths of a second.
As Einstein’s theory predicts, when particles are traveling at nearly light speed, time dilates. So, when circulating in the superconducting storage ring at close to the speed of light, the muon appears to the observer to live much longer — about 64 microseconds. That’s enough time to allow scientists to make precise measurements of its properties.
“The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon is one of the currently unexplained phenomena in physics,” says Aaron Epps of Dixon, a first-year NIU graduate student who plans to earn his Ph.D. in physics. “If this anomaly is confirmed, it points to physics that we do not presently understand and will lead to new theories to explain the phenomena.”
One of NIU’s main roles in g-2 is quality-control testing for a complex straw tube tracker—a type of particle detector being built in Liverpool, England. The device detects particles known as positrons, which result from the decay of muons.
The flexible design building will test low-energy systems and components.
The world’s most advanced energy efficiency test bed for buildings was launched this month by US Department of Energy (DOE) Deputy Secretary Daniel Poneman. Built at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Flexlab is already signing up companies determined to reduce energy use by testing and deploying the most energy efficient technologies as integrated systems under real-world conditions. Flexlab includes a rotating testbed which can track with the sun. In the first test bed experiment, leading biotech company Genentech is using Flexlab to test systems for a new building at its South San Francisco headquarters. Flexlab represents a new type of experiment for us, and presents the opportunity to be first-in-class in another area of innovation.' Flexlab allows users to mock up facilities, such as this interior by Webcor for biotech firm, Genentech. That’s what Bay Area-based builder Webcor – Genentech’s contractor – hopes to find. In Flexlab’s pre-launch private-sector experiment, Webcor is using the rotating test bed to plan a 250,000 ft2 building, which includes a built space that mimics Genentech’s interior office space and will test for user comfort and utility. 'We are running tests and gathering data that will allow us to maximize the Genentech building’s energy-efficiency potential,' said Webcor CEO Jes Pederson. 'Flexlab could revolutionize the way we plan and build energy-efficient buildings.' Recognizing that building inefficiency is a critical obstacle to achieving US clean energy and emissions goals, DOE issued a Request for Proposal in 2009 for a new kind of testing facility to address the challenges buildings face in achieving deeper levels of energy savings. Many buildings are designed to be energy efficient, but once they are up and running, can use a lot more energy than planned. To close that achievement gap and accelerate breakthrough technologies, Berkeley Lab competed and won the US$15.9m contract to build Flexlab, a testament to the Lab’s long history of energy efficiency innovations.
Oxford Univ. technology can draw images 70 micrometers across; each image is smaller than the width of a human hair. The researchers have shown that using this technology they can create nanopixels just 100 nanometers in size that could pave the way for extremely high-resolution and low-energy thin, flexible displays for applications such as smart glasses, synthetic retinas and foldable screens.
A team led by Univ. of Oxford scientists explored the link between the electrical and optical properties of phase change materials (materials that can change from an amorphous to a crystalline state). They found that by sandwiching a seven nanometer thick layer of a phase change material (GST) between two layers of a transparent electrode they could use a tiny current to “draw” images within the sandwich “stack.”
Initially still images were created using an atomic force microscope but the team went on to demonstrate that such tiny “stacks” can be turned into prototype pixel-like devices. These “nanopixels” – just 300 by 300 nanometers in size – can be electrically switched on and off at will, creating the colored dots that would form the building blocks of an extremely high-resolution display technology.
“We didn't set out to invent a new kind of display,” says Prof. Harish Bhaskaran of Oxford Univ.'s Department of Materials, who led the research. “We were exploring the relationship between the electrical and optical properties of phase change materials and then had the idea of creating this GST 'sandwich' made up of layers just a few nanometers thick. We found that not only were we able to create images in the stack but, to our surprise, thinner layers of GST actually gave us better contrast. We also discovered that altering the size of the bottom electrode layer enabled us to change the color of the image.”
Whilst the work is still in its early stages, realizing its potential, the Oxford team has filed a patent on the discovery with the help of Isis Innovation, Oxford Univ.'s technology commercialization company. Isis is now discussing the displays with companies who are interested in assessing the technology, and with investors.
The layers of the GST sandwich are created using a sputtering technique where a target is bombarded with high energy particles so that atoms from the target are deposited onto another material as a thin film.
“Because the layers that make up our devices can be deposited as thin films they can be incorporated into very thin flexible materials – we have already demonstrated that the technique works on flexible Mylar sheets around 200 nanometers thick,” says Bhaskaran. “This makes them potentially useful for 'smart' glasses, foldable screens, windshield displays and even synthetic retinas that mimic the abilities of photoreceptor cells in the human eye.”
Peiman Hosseini of Oxford Univ.'s Department of Materials, first author of the paper, says, “Our models are so good at predicting the experiment that we can tune our prototype 'pixels' to create any color we want – including the primary colors needed for a display. One of the advantages of our design is that, unlike most conventional LCD screens, there would be no need to constantly refresh all pixels, you would only have to refresh those pixels that actually change – static pixels remain as they were. This means that any display based on this technology would have extremely low energy consumption.”
The research suggests that flexible paper-thin displays based on the technology could have the capacity to switch between a power-saving “color e-reader mode,” and a backlit display capable of showing video. Such displays could be created using cheap materials and, because they would be solid-state, promise to be reliable and easy to manufacture. The tiny nanopixels make it ideal for applications, such as smart glasses, where an image would be projected at a larger size as, even enlarged, they would offer very high-resolution.
Prof. David Wright of the Department of Engineering at the Univ. of Exeter, co-author of the paper, says, “Along with many other researchers around the world we have been looking into the use of these GST materials for memory applications for many years, but no one before thought of combining their electrical and optical functionality to provide entirely new kinds of non-volatile, high-resolution, electronic color displays – so our work is a real breakthrough.”
Bhaskaran says that the discovery would not have been possible without the support of the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). “EPSRC have been funding our fundamental research and this chance discovery shows just where support for so-called 'blue skies' research can lead.” The phase change material used was the alloy Ge2Sb2Te5 (Germanium-Antimony-Tellurium or GST) sandwiched between electrode layers made of indium tin oxide (ITO).
HOK WEIAs the newest alternative energy research center, the Wisconsin Energy Institute (WEI) is earning accolades for sustainability and energy conservation. The five-story 104,000-sf research center at Univ. of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison, Wis. has earned LEED Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and top honors in commercial design locally. WEI is designed by the St. Louis office of HOK and Madison-based Potter Lawson. The $57.1 million facility hosts cutting-edge renewable energy systems research and opened in 2013. Among the design features that earned the WEI LEED Gold Certification were a central light well and floor-to-ceiling windows to help distribute natural light, while occupancy and daylight-harvesting sensors help manage use of artificial lighting; the former site's parking lot was converted to green space featuring a research-relevant perennial garden and a bioswale area to filter silt in storm water before drainage to city facilities; about 96% of all construction waste—more than 10,600 tons of concrete, 220 tons of steel and 40 tons of wood—was recycled; low-flow fixtures to provide 30% improvement in water efficiency; and a 22-Kw photovoltaic array to supplement building's power needs. It also includes chilled beam technology which utilizes natural air flows to minimize energy use in heating and cooling office space.
A collaboration between Cisco and the Electronics City Industries Association (ELCIA) will bring about Asia's first end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation Hub in Bangalore.
Riding on India's fast growing Internet penetration, this collaboration will help establish the foundation for a new ecosystem to help Electronic System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) companies and other companies of electronic city engaged in IoT product development. ELCIA has been chosen for this ambitious project as it is the only brown field ESDM cluster in the country, which has received an in principal approval for a financial grant from the government to spur innovation in product design and manufacturing.
This is in line with Cisco's goal to invest further in emerging technologies such as Big Data, and the Internet of Things.
According to a Task Force report commissioned by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), the demand for electronics hardware in the country is projected to increase to $400 billion by 2020, and this initiative will help address domestic demand, allowing local manufacturers to capture this growing market opportunity and save precious foreign exchange for India.
As part of this effort, Cisco will help provide the network infrastructure and expertise for testing and production of electronic product prototypes for an IoT enabled smart city environment. Through the Living Lab, ESDM start-ups and other electronic city companies can build solutions for City Infrastructure Management (CIM) including smart parking, smart CCTV surveillance, smart street lighting, smart water management/leak detection and community messaging. The project will utilize the Cisco Smart+Connected City Wi-Fi solution that will help enable community Wi-Fi services and allow access to public utility offerings. ELCIA will also embed Cisco network equipment comprising of access points, routers, switches, and other required hardware and software applications that will be connected to the smart city's fibre-optic backbone network.
The first phase of this smart city project will be rolled out in Electronics City and will serve as a replicable model for the rest of Bangalore as well as other cities in India, across the region, and other emerging markets. Participating companies would gain access to boot strap funding for their ventures under Cisco's IoT Innovation Fund, provided there is a strong idea for new IoT product / application development with a commercially viable business case, as well as a chance to participate in the global Cisco IoT Challenge.
This project is being undertaken as part of the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities concept that places technology at the heart of economic development and better quality of life in modern cities. The focus is on using the network to deploy digitally enabled transportation, healthcare, education, utilities, energy grid, and real estate in cities.
On this occasion, Anil Menon, president Smart+Connected Communities and deputy chief globalization officer, said: "India has always been at the core of our emerging market strategy, and we see this arrangement as a tremendous opportunity for us to demonstrate our global expertise in IoT enabled technology. According to our IoE value index, the potential value at stake in India is $34.8 billion, and this initiative underscores our commitment to build an effective ecosystem to enable Indian start-ups help realize this potential to the fullest, in turn creating employment opportunities and contributing to economic growth through innovation.
OCSiAl, a technology manufacturer for the mass industrial production of graphene tubes, announces that it has acquired Zyvex Technologies, making the combined organization the largest nanotechnology company in the world. The partnership between OCSiAl and Zyvex Technologies will combine large scale manufacturing capabilities with commercialization expertise.
OCSiAl is known for developing graphene tubes under the brand name Tuball, while Zyvex Technologies produces carbon nanomaterial applications. The latter’s nanotechnology-based products are already integrated into a number of products, ranging from Easton sporting goods to Airbus next generation materials research.
“From improved quality and durability of consumer goods to premier, high level projects, the combination of OCSiAl’s manufacturing capabilities and the scale and expertise of each company’s respective market, we are creating a vertically integrated organization that serves customers better with readily available nanotech products,” says Yuri Koropachinsky, President of OCSiAl. “Zyvex Technologies has built a tremendous team that we are excited to welcome into the OCSiAl family – and together, we will usher in a new age of technology for businesses and consumers alike.”
Graphene, a single atom thick sheet of carbon – proclaimed as the “wonder material of the 21st century” by the American Chemical Society – makes batteries more powerful and long-lasting, construction materials lighter, polymers stronger, and improves the electrical and thermal conductivity of composites. In contrast with other technologies, many of its applications do not require changes in currently used equipment or processes.
Zyvex Technologies will continue to operate with its own distinct brand identity and product line while contributing to the growth of OCSiAl.
“We are thrilled to join OCSiAl,” says Lance Criscuolo, President of Zyvex Technologies. “Zyvex was the first recognized nanomaterials company in the United States. Now with support from OCSiAl, Zyvex will be in an even better position to bring the potential of nanotechnology into powerful commercial reality.”
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