With a foil made up of incredibly thin layers of simple elements, two professors at the Johns Hopkins University say they have discovered a better way to bond metal and ceramic components. Don?t let your eyes glaze yet: This nanotech solution could tap into a $10 billion market.
Timothy Weihs, chief executive and co-founder of the pair?s newly formed Reactive NanoTechnologies Inc., recently discussed how it works and how it could affect Baltimore.
You recently received $2 million in venture funding for your bonding foil. How does it work?
Basically, what we?ve developed is a foil that?s a heat source. You can use that heat source to melt solders or braises and form joints. That?s the simple explanation. You can put that foil between two pieces that you want to join, and under a little bit of pressure, ignite the reaction in the foil. The foil heats up, melts the solder and forms the joint.
Why is that better than other ways of forming a joint, heating with a furnace, for example?
Have you ever seen someone welding? When you?re soldering or brazing, you have to melt the solder or braise — and typically you have to heat those components. You?re stuck either using a torch to heat the solder and the component or putting them into a furnace to heat them.
Imagine if you want to join a [computer] chip onto a heatsink. You have to put the whole chip and the heat sink into a furnace at high enough temperatures to melt the solder and form the joint.
There?re a lot of devices and materials that?d rather not be heated. You can understand why you don?t want to put chips into a furnace. Optical devices are the same way. You?d prefer not to heat them too much. There?re a number of cases where you actually thermally damage the material.
There?s another aspect to heating and cooling that?s a strong selling point for us: if you?re trying to join metal and ceramic. Ceramics are wonderful materials in that they?re very hard and corrosion-resistant. But one of the difficulties is that because they?re so hard, they?re very difficult to machine. You can?t really drill holes in them and bolt them, like you could a steel plate.
What they typically try to do then is braise them together. A braise is a high-melting-temperature solder. You put that braise between the metal and ceramic you?re trying to join, you put them into a furnace and you have to heat them to about 700 degrees centigrade.
You may remember from high school physics, if you heat a metal, it expands. Ceramics do, too, but not nearly as much. As these materials start to cool, the metal wants to shrink a lot more than the ceramic. What you end up with is a big stress in the joint.
With our method, you don?t have to heat the materials themselves up. They see very little heating, therefore you don?t have the mismatch and contraction on cooling.
And the nanotech part is that this is happening on the atomic level?
The foil consists of hundreds of nano-scale layers. You have a foil that may look like aluminum foil but instead of being all aluminum, it?s half aluminum and half nickel. It has literally hundreds of layers that are nano-scale in thickness. You?re looking at anywhere from several atoms to hundreds of atoms thick.
What are some applications for this stuff?
Any metal-ceramic joining. One application we are looking into is joining armor onto tanks. There are a lot of applications in aerospace, in automobiles, even in home appliances.
How did you discover it?
The work began back at Lawrence Livermore Lab, where I was working as a post-doc. It wasn?t just one moment; it was really over the period of a year. We found out you can control the velocity and the heat [of these reactions] very accurately by changing the layer thickness, as well as the chemistry. A company came to us looking for a rapid heat source, and we said this may do it.
Do you have any idea how big your market is?
Our initial market we?re going after is about $1.2 billion. The full market we feel is about $12 billion. If you look at everything from adhesives and glues to welding, soldering and braising, a recent Time magazine article estimated that [market] at $50 billion. We think we can address in the order of 20 percent of that. There are a number of other applications we can explore, in terms of ignition and propulsion as well.
Do you have any contracts or orders yet?
We do. We have contracts. The hope is that by the end of the first year, we?ll have our first sales. You have to [persuade] companies to change the way they join components in their line. To do that, you have to convince them that not only is this an effective joining protocol but a cost-effective one as well. We?re doing that with a number of companies right now.
Who are some of those companies? How big are the contracts?
I?d rather not mention them just because they haven?t OK’d disclosures. These are Fortune 500 companies. Commercial and military, there?re a number [of them.]
How many employees do you have?
There?re five of us right now.
Where are your offices?
[The Emerging Technology Center in Canton] is our home right now. It?s more of a virtual office to be honest. We?re planning to set up a facility in north Baltimore. We?re negotiating a lease and hope to be moving in there in a little over a month.
Will you increase the employment then?
Yeah, it will be going up. We?re not going to jump up too quickly. We?ll bring on a VP of business development, probably a sales person and another one or two engineers.
I?d assume by the end of the year we?re up close to ten [employees.]
How big would you like to see the company grow?
We?re expecting to get up to $100 million in sales in six or so years. We?re clearly expecting to get fairly large.
To get there, will you need more funding?
Oh yeah. We?re exploring possibilities slowly at this point. We spent a lot of time raising the “A” round. We?re more just keeping people in the loop and letting them know that we?ll be coming to them in six months or so.
Any idea of how much you will be looking for in six months?
A ballpark figure is probably $7 to $10 million.
Nanotech — building things on a tiny, atomic scale — has been receiving a lot of interest lately. Why?
It?s a combination of issues. One is that your dot-com industry has fallen on hard times, so people are looking for other applications. It covers a lot of industries. It?s not limited to, say, your fiber-optics community that has fallen on hard times right now. We can cover a broad range of industries so there?s safety in that. If semiconductors take a big dive that?s not going to kill us because there?re many other industries to which we can go.
You?re an engineering professor at Hopkins. Are you going to quit your day job any time soon?
I?ve already started that process, but it?s not all or nothing. There?s still a lot of research money we have from the U.S. government into Hopkins that?s focusing on the foils. We don?t want to just give up all of that. We?re trying to do a gradual shift, where we maintain some ties here. My co-founder and myself stopped teaching as of January and the university has been very supportive.
Does Hopkins have an ownership stake in the company?
Yes, they do. A number of the patent applications came out of Hopkins. They have both an equity and a royalty stake in that.
One of the problems with Maryland in general is that we get loads of federal dollars, [but] you look at the amount of tech transfer that occurs based on that federal R&D budget and it?s tiny compared to, say, California.
A lot of folks in the state would like to see that increase, and Hopkins is certainly among those. They?re working hard to do that, and we?re one example of that happening.
Does Hopkins put any restrictions on where you locate your business as you try and commercialize a technology developed at the university?
No, but they?d certainly like us to stay in the area. We would like to stay in the area as well. We have access to facilities here, as any other company would, that are very useful to us.
Generally, I?d like this to be a win-win for Hopkins, our company and for the state.
