Wednesday afternoon at the Industrial Physics Forum featured a session on entrepreneurial professors. Participants heard about the successes and setbacks of four companies started by current or former university faculty from around the world.
Bringing the thrill of astronomy to the masses
Doug Arion, from Carthage College in Wisconsin, described his venture to design, manufacture, distribute, and support a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit to commemorate the International Year of Astronomy in 2009.
The project sprang from the idea that everyone should be able to look at the stars and planets. When Arion and his colleagues started investigating commercial telescopes, however, they found the cheapest telescopes had terrible optics. While inexpensive telescopes “make wonderful doorstops,” Arion said, the toys could actually turn people off to the experience of astronomy because they show so little.
Arion started Galileoscope with his business partner Rick Fienberg, the press officer at the American Astronomical Society, to supply what the market lacked: a good, inexpensive telescope. They pulled together a team of engineers, lawyers, accountants, and manufacturing and logistics experts to create and ship “the marijuana of telescopes”—hoping to get people hooked on science by showing them Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons with a refracting telescope similar to the one that Galileo designed, built, and used.
The project encountered numerous challenges. In 2008 the world economy collapsed and the corporate sponsors that Arion and Feinberg were hoping would fund their venture disappeared from the scene. The two business partners had to put $100 000 of their own money into the company just to get it started, and far more to keep it operating.
The telescope design was scrutinized for every possible cost-saving feature. A ten-cent screw may not seem expensive at first blush, but when the cost is multiplied by a million units, it could result in an extra $100 000 expense for the company.
The final design incorporated glass lenses in an injection molded plastic body. Many design issues were considered in developing the product, including availability of small spare parts. The finished kits cost customers $25 per telescope if they buy a box of six.
What you find when you open the GalileoScope box. CREDIT: Rick Fienberg
To date, the company has delivered more than 200 000 units to more than 100 countries, with Brazil a major customer. Through a buy a telescope/donate a telescope program, the company has also supplied 7000 free telescopes to South Africa.
Galileoscope is now gearing up for the International Year of Light in 2015, with the goal of distributing 100 000 new telescopes that year.
Measuring multi-phase flow in the petroleum industry
The session’s second speaker, Daniel Pusiol, used his years of experience researching quadrupole and magnetic resonance to found SpinLock, an R&D company closely linked to the National University of Córdoba, in Argentina.
Spinlock was started in 2003 as a spinoff from the university’s NMR research group. The company has developed a wide range of products, but Pusiol focused his talk on how Spinlock tackled one of the more important technical challenges in the oil and gas industry: how to measure the flow rate of oil, water, and gas from a wellhead when all three products are mixed together. Because the three components have different densities and viscosities, it is not possible to determine flow rate by measuring the pressure drop across a flow restriction.
The “robust, but expensive” solution, Pusiol said, is to collect the oil and gas in large measurements tanks. But tanks are impractical for offshore operations. Many existing multi-phase flow meters use gamma-ray absorption technology to identify the different fluids. Spinlock, in collaboration with the oil company Shell, developed an alternative solution based on NMR technology, which does not require a radioactive source.
Spinlock’s flow meter contains two main parts: a polarization segment and an NMR segment. Oil and water react differently to the polarization segment, allowing the NMR segment to measure the flow properties and composition of the mixture. The meter operates at higher flow rates than other NMR flow meters. It was tested on a commercial flow loop to confirm the accuracy of its measurements and operating parameters.
Testing for contamination with a cell phone
Simarjeet Saini is a nanophotonics researcher from the University of Waterloo in Canada with an impressive track record of creating startups. He presented the technology behind his brand new fourth company, named Nanolytix.
Food and water safety is a big concern in India. Sixty-eight percent of the water is contaminated and more than 80% of milk is adulterated in some way. Nanolytix is developing cell phone spectrometers and nanophotonic chips to serve as inexpensive contaminant sensors in the Indian market.
Approximately 100 million people own smart phones in India. The devices therefore make for a good starting point for wide-reaching technology. Saini and his colleagues devised a way to turn a cell phone into a small spectrometer by using the camera on the phone to capture spectral data. Almost all of the other components in the spectrometer are made in Saini’s lab, including the phase gratings, which have 1800 lines/mm and cost less than $10 per grating to make. The spectrometer can detect the presence of 0.1% palm olein, a liquid form of palm oil, in extra virgin olive oil.
Testing Nanolytix's cell phone spectrometer. CREDIT: Simarjeet Saini
The second aspect of Nanolytix’s work involves nanophotonic chips, in the form of silicon nanowire arrays or surface plasmonic sensors. The chips are designed to change color when exposed to a contaminant. The color change can be captured and analyzed by a cell phone with image-processing capabilities.
Novel catalytic structures for cleaner air
The final speaker of the session, Guilherme Goncalves, is an economist from Limpgas Tecnologia, a clean energy company started at the Physics Institute of the University of Campinas, where IPF 2014 was held.
Goncalves described his company’s aim to find new ways of processing the carbon dioxice and hazardous waste gases produced by industry. Limpgas Tecnologia produces sponge-like structures made from aluminum, titanium, diamond-like carbon, and other materials. The structures have intricate bumps, groves, nooks, and crannies that drastically increase surface area.
A sponge-like structure made from titanium. CREDIT: Limpgas Tecnologia
The company also produces tiny nanoparticles that they embed into the sponge-like structures using low-temperature plasma, producing novel catalytic materials.
The materials are designed to break down hazardous gases such as nitrogen oxide and volatile hydrocarbons, while also breaking apart CO2 and precipitating the carbon.
Carlos Salles Lambert, a scientist at the University of Campinas, is the main researcher behind Limpgas Tecnologia’s projects. The company has been researching its process for five years and plans to run their first pilot project in the next two years. They are currently looking for R&D partnerships that could accelerate the entry of their products into the market.
Catherine Meyers is a writer in the Media Services division of the American Institute of Physics.
