NIST Industrial Impact

Company: Nanophase Technology Corp., Burr Ridge, Illinois
Business: Nanocrystalline materials
Number of Employees: 61

Whether you want a better sunscreen, a computer chip with more memory and faster processing speed, a factory part with a longer lifetime, or an ultrafast industrial catalyst, Nanophase Technologies Corp. has something for you— materials with nanosized particles.

The advantages of materials containing nanosized particles (less than 100 billionths of a meter in size) long have been exalted by scientists, but the average American could not enjoy them until this small Illinois company had an idea for how to make large quantities of these materials economically, and NIST's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) helped turn it into reality.

In the early 1990s Nanophase had two employees, a nearly empty laboratory, little money, and no customers. Buoyed by co-funding from the ATP to explore a radically new material production process, the company now has 61 employees, a proven technology, a 24-hour-a-day factory, and major corporations testing and selling its products. More specifically, the ATP project, which ended in 1995, led to the following measurable benefits:

• The company was able to achieve a 25,000-fold increase (by weight) in its capability to produce nanoscale materials and a 20,000-fold reduction in cost.

• Sunscreens made with these materials already are on the market, offering increased protection levels.

• Tests of prototype products made with these materials show that mechanical seals gain up to 10-fold increases in service life and industrial catalysts become up to four times more active.

"Although my company is still very small in revenue size, we are now the world's leader in the production and marketing of nanocrystalline materials for a wide range of important applications," President and Chief Executive Officer Robert Cross said shortly after completion of the ATP project. "That also means that the United States is now the world's leader in this important field. It was not always that way, and it would not be that way today were it not for the support of the ATP."

Cross credited the ATP with enabling Nanophase to turn a promising laboratory process into a generic approach suitable for production, attract substantial industry collaborators and millions in venture capital funding, and sign an agreement to distribute its materials in more than 300 countries. The company began making commercial quantities of material in late 1996 and quickly found buyers, reporting $2.24 million in sales for the initial nine months of 1997.

Formed in 1989 to commercialize principles developed at Argonne National Laboratory, the company has staked its rising fortunes on a process called physical vapor synthesis (PVS). In this process, an inorganic material is heated and vaporized, the atoms are mixed with gases that cause chemical reactions, and the atoms are cooled and condensed into loose clusters of nanosized particles.

The process won an R&D 100 award in 1995 from R&D Magazine, which annually recognizes the most technologically significant new products and processes. More important from a practical standpoint, the ATP-funded research helped Nanophase understand how to transform production efficiency from 10 grams per day at $1,000 per gram to the current 100 tons per year at 5 cents per gram. "There is no limit, because what we developed is a modular system that can be cloned an infinite number of times," says Don Freed, vice president for marketing.

The PVS process makes particles that are nearly spherical, close to uniform in size, free of chemical residues, and prone to forming loose clusters for easy dispersion, features that allow the company to engineer attributes such as strength, color, and conductivity. The generic process is used to make various metals, ceramics, and composites for applications in electronics, industrial and protective structures, cosmetics and skin care, and industrial catalysts.

Nanophase already is shipping materials that are used in sunscreens and foot powders and sprays. According to Nanophase, independent tests show sunscreens using its nanocrystalline titania (a non-irritating alternative to sun-blocking chemicals) provide higher SPF protection using less material than conventional products, with no skin-whitening effect.

The company also received a five-year, $30 million order for nanocrystalline materials from a manufacturer of semiconductor polishing slurries. Slurries containing the nanosized materials are being evaluated by five major electronics companies for their effectiveness in smoothing the surfaces of semiconductor wafers. Nanophase says these slurries will produce much smoother wafer surfaces and have other advantages over conventional slurries, resulting in increased memory capacity, faster processing speeds, and lower production costs.

Also in the electronics area, the company is collaborating with industry customers to develop a coating to increase radiation shielding for cathode ray tubes, materials for high-performance electrodes used in medical devices, thin-film surfaces for semiconductors that increase memory capacity and processing speeds, and photonic materials for advanced flat-panel displays.

The ATP funding also was used to refine and demonstrate a net-shaping process used to mold nanoscale ceramics into structural parts. In this process, ceramics powders and additives are mixed, fluid binders are added, and the part is pressed, dried, sintered, and forged. The process is much faster and less expensive than conventional fabrication methods, according to the company.

Nanophase is working with a number of collaborators and customers to make net-shaped ceramic nozzles for steel casting, mechanical seals for use in harsh manufacturing environments, armor plates, and housings for electronic medical devices. Customer tests of prototype seal designs indicate that service life can be increased up to 10-fold, reducing downtime and costs. Other studies suggest that armor made with nanocrystalline materials will have greater durability and impact resistance and lower costs than armor made with conventional materials.

Still another application of the broadly applicable ATP-funded technology is catalysts, widely used in the chemical industry to enable or accelerate the conversion of one material into another. Nanocrystalline materials offer a greater proportion of active surface atoms than conventional catalysts and can lower costs as well. Nanophase is developing catalysts with two chemical companies. One set of tests reveals a two- to fourfold increase in catalytic activity over current catalysts, according to Nanophase.

July 1998