Thanks to all for continuing to follow our journey here at Smart Material Solutions! If you’re a potential industrial partner, now is the ideal time to start pilot scale work with us. Our patterning capabilities are better than ever, and we have more than two years of funding runway through non-dilutive R&D contracts with NASA and the Army. We’ve also added key skill sets to our team here at SMS.
As always, we appreciate your support, feedback, and curiosity. Please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Seamless Molds for R2R NIL
Over the past year, we’ve increased the range of our feature patterning capabilities. We can now make features on a pitch from 200 nm to 8 microns with aspect ratios (feature height / pitch) of up to 0.7. We can make seamless cylindrical molds up to 160 mm with extremely low defect rates and oftentimes precision shape control. Mold materials include nickel, copper, aluminum, and even UV transparent glass! All of our molds are available with adhesion reducing fluorination coatings.
The images below show recent work creating nanoscale, microscale, hierarchical, and multiscale features on large, seamless drum molds.
Welcome to Robin McDonald and Sidney Cox!
We’re excited to welcome our newest full time team member, Robin McDonald. Robin is a talented materials scientist who graduated at the top of her class at Caltech. We’ve also added part time consulting with Dr. Sidney Cox, a physical chemist with three decades of experience at Dupont and Tethis. We now have four full-time and two part-time staff, three active university partnerships, and two funded industrial sub-contractors helping us take the benefits of metamaterials and nanostructured surfaces to the industrial scale!
New Army SBIR and STTR Awards
SMS recently signed two new contracts with the Army, securing a 24 month funding runway - our longest ever! The first is a Phase II SBIR to roll-to-roll (R2R) fabricate thin-film solar panels with light-trapping, anti-fouling coatings in collaboration with MicroContinuum and PowerFilm. The second contract, a Sequential Phase II STTR, will allow us to collaborate with MicroContinuum and the University of Delaware to R2R fabricate a series of plasmonic metamaterial films with advanced optical properties.
Conference Schedule
We will be attending and presenting at several conferences this fall. We look forward to meeting with you there!
NNT - Nanoimprint and Nanoprint Technologies - (Boston, MA, October 9-11). Lauren Micklow will be giving a talk at 11:20 am on Wednesday.
ASPE - American Society of Precision Engineering - (Boston, MA, November 12-17)
Carolina Science Symposium (Raleigh, NC, November 17)
Blogs
Check out our new blog posts on electrolytic and electroless coatings and microscopy!