Roll-to-Roll Embossing at MicroContinuum, Inc.
We recently sent one of our seamless high-phosphorous nickel drum molds to MicroContinuum for mass replication via roll-to-roll (R2R) thermal embossing, shown above. Smart Material Solutions patterned the drum with two 50 mm wide strips of 300 nm features. The drum took five hours to pattern and contains 600 billion features. MicroContinuum used the drum to nanopattern 500 feet of polycarbonate as part of an ongoing Army Phase II Sequential STTR grant.
Dust-Mitigating Surfaces for NASA - Coming Soon
In November, SMS completed a Phase I SBIR project funded by NASA along with Prof. Chih-Hao Chang’s group at UT Austin. We’re saving the announcement of our exciting results to coincide with a publication planned for early next year. We hope the work will continue with Phase II funding starting in February as well!
Check Out Three New Blog Posts!
The SMS team published three new blog posts: structural color, dust-mitigating surfaces, and roll-to-roll nanoimprint lithography. Let us know if you have any questions or corrections!
Other Announcements
Stephen Furst completed a three-year term as a board member for the American Society of Precision Engineering (ASPE).
Lauren Micklow and Nichole Cates gave an invited talk titled Scalable Nanofabrication at the Carolina Science Symposium.
Parker Eaton, an SMS intern and NCSU graduate student, gave a plenary talk on controlling form error in indented microlens arrays at the ASPE annual meeting in Minneapolis.