(Note: the most recent Ceramic Tech Today email—May 15, 2012—accidentally contained an older link that directs readers to this page. For readers who want to go to P. Carlo Ratto’s most recent “News from the glass and refractory worlds, please click here.)

• According to reports, Asahi Glass is considering expanding a factory it has just started building in Brazil, in order to double the facility’s planned output of automotive glass.

• Martin Marietta Magnesia Specialties LLC announced recently it would add a sixth kiln at its dolomitic lime production facility in Woodville.

• A silicon metal smelter will be setup in Abu Dhabi’s newest industrial zone KIZAD, which will supply high grade silicon to aluminium smelters in the region. The plant operated by Al Braik Investments is estimated to cost around Dh638 million.

• Montreal-based Rio Tinto Alcan hopes to seal the sale of four alumina plants by the end of September; at the end of March, Rio Tinto had received a binding offer from private equity group HIG for its three specialty alumina plants in France and one in Germany and would respond to the offer after consulting unions.

• Kerneos, a world leader in calcium aluminates, is pleased to announce that it has acquired a 54% stake in the capital of the Greek company Elmin, the leading European exporter of monohydrate bauxite.

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About two weeks ago, I wrote about a startup company founded by two ex-materials science students that goes by the name of Power Practical. The company has developed some nifty thermoelectrics gadgets called PowerPots that combined a camper’s cookpot with an integrated power-generation system that could be used for LED lights, charging cell phones and enabling other USB devices.

One of the intriguing things (for me, anyway) is that instead of bootstrapping their enterprise via traditional investment sources, Power Practical turned to Kickstarter, a three-year-old crowdfunding project. With Kickstarter, projects must set a fundraising goal and are given a chance to make an online pitch for supporters to pledge anywhere from $1 up to hundreds of dollars, typically using a stair-step offer of premiums (like your local PBS station pledge drive). Through Kickstarter web pages, companies, such as Power Practical, can make use of videos, links to external websites, Facebook pages and anything else they can think of to help sell the idea of why they deserve monetary support. The only catch is that they have 30 days to reach their fundraising goal — and then its all or nothing: If your goal was $30,000 and you only got $27,000 pledged, you get nothing at the end of the 30 days. (There is some more fine print: If a company reaches its goal, Kickstarter takes a 5 percent commission, and Amazon, which handles the pledge/investment transactions, also takes a cut.)

Returning to Power Practical and PowerPots, the company’s Kickstarter goal was $50,000, but, hell, they soared past that weeks ago. Today is the last day of their 30-day period and they have raised more than $126,000!

Lest any reader think reaching this level of Kickstarter success is easy, a New York Times infographic shows that only 44 percent of the projects reach their goals, and the average financing for technology projects is only $11,704. So, relatively speaking, Power Practical/PowerPots smacked a Kickstarter home run.

Microfinancing efforts, such as Kickstarter, won’t replace in the materials science world’s corporate investments, venture capital or government support, but my guess is that this is still relatively unexplored territory. The New York Times story published around the time Practical Power jumped on Kickstarter reports on how projects have been moving from mainly novelty efforts to more serious tech-oriented proposals:

Although the site first began as a way for people to raise money for quirky projects like pop-up wedding chapels, around-the-world boating trips and offbeat documentaries, it quickly expanded to include video game production, feature films and innovative new gadgets, like the Elevation dock, a sleek stand for the iPhone, or Brydge, which turns an iPad into a laptop resembling the MacBook Air.

The NYT story also makes a great point that “Kickstarter offers budding entrepreneurs a way to float ideas and see if there’s a market for them before they trade ownership of their company for money from venture capitalists.”

Kickstarter isn’t alone. Sites, such as RocketHub, and IndieGoGo are doing similar things.

Despite the success of PowerPots and other tech-oriented proposals on these sites, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that not everyone is convinced that these general-interest crowdfunding websites are the best match for science and applied science ideas. Along these lines, two environmental scientists, Jarrett Byrnes and Jai Ranganathan, launched the #SciFund Challenge last year with a “call to arms” written by Byrnes.

The current rate of funding for science proposals in the U.S. is ~20%. … All of the traditional sources of cash for science — the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, private foundations — are getting harder and harder to access. And the situation is probably only going to get worse. So what is a scientist to do? … We’d like to propose an experiment to fund our science in an entirely new way — the #SciFund Challenge.

The #SciFund Challenge isn’t really a stand-alone website, but is apparently a subset of the larger RocketHub, mentioned above. It seems that the organizers try to package and publish a multitude of funding proposals in a series of “rounds” that are featured on RocketHub for one month. “Round 2″ was launched this week and includes proposals from 70 different researchers. Here is a look at them:

According to the #SciFund Challenge blog, over $15,000 was raised during the first 24 hours.

What do you think? Is crowdfunding sci-tech work and startups a novelty or something that will eventually be engrained as another go-to option for researchers and entrepreneurs?

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GE locomotive battery. Credit: GE Global Research.

Once again, Alfred University is in the news for working with a corporate partner under the auspices of a New York State technology initiative. School officials have just announced that the university and General Electric have signed a contract to develop a new generation of sodium metal halide batteries as part of a consortium funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

Just a few weeks back, we wrote how research groups at the school were leveraging expertise in advanced ceramics, glass and cutting-edge materials to develop working relationships with companies to develop interconnects for fuel cells and GaN-on-diamond substrate projects with private partners, also under the auspices of NYSERDA.

According to an AU press release, the latest project involves developing huge sodium metal halide batteries for applications that include hybrid locomotives and back-up power for telecommunication sites. Doreen Edwards, dean of the Inamori School of Engineering at AU says the research will focus on improving battery reliability, cycle life and performance.

The consortium, led by GE Global Research, includes AU, Clarkson University, Columbia University, SUNY-Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Lab.

In the release, Matthew Hall, an AU engineering professor, says, ”This is a fantastic opportunity for Alfred because it directly complements our research interests and expertise. At least half of our research effort is devoted to energy applications. And a lot [of the work] would be an extension of the work done on fuel cells here for the last decade.”

Hall is also director of AU’s Center for Advanced Ceramic Technology, which exists to facilitate collaboration between industry and academia. CACT receives financial support from another New York State sci-tech initiative, NYSTAR.

According to Edwards, there will be at least three major components to AU’s work. The first will be to develop a more durable and conductive ceramic electrolyte separating the cathode from the anode and will likely focus on improving the mechanical and electrical properties of beta-alumina solid electrolyte.

The second will be to identify a more robust and corrosion-resistant glass for encasing the batteries’ electrical components. According to Edwards, AU and GEGR will develop accelerated glass stability tests to understand glass corrosion mechanisms and predict seal life.

Finally, AU will also be developing computational models to accelerate further improvements, including meso-scale computer simulations to refine beta-alumina solid electrolyte sample properties and a model for predicting the thermal properties as a function of glass composition.

“We are very excited to work with Alfred University to improve our sodium metal halide battery technology,” says Job Rijssenbeek, GEGR principal investigator. “Alfred’s expertise in ceramics and glasses is world renownd and we’ve had extremely productive collaborations in the past.”

With that type of reputation, its no wonder AU and its Inamori School of Engineering seem to be on a roll with these private sector collaborations.

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A recent article in The Economist says manufacturers are starting to see materials innovations as critical to developing game-changing products.

A recent article in article in The Economist takes a look ways certain manufacturers that depend on innovation have figured out that the best, cheapest and quickest results come from having materials scientists, design engineers and production engineers within spitting distance of each other. It used to be that these functions were separated, sometimes by large distances, perhaps even by countries. The article quotes Hamid Mughal, Rolls-Royce head of manufacturing engineering, saying, “Product technology is the key to survival, and manufacturing excellence provides one of the biggest opportunities in the future. … Incremental increases won’t do it.”

Companies are realizing that materials engineers need to be part of those teams. The article gives examples such as GE’s development of a “nickel-and-salt” battery for a hybrid locomotive engine application. Another example is the development of carbon fiber composites for fan blades, aircraft fuselages and wings and even race cars.

The article goes on to highlight a few products that are still in the prototype stages, like building blocks made from recycled PET and concrete bonding agents extracted from rice husks.

Back-peddling a little more, the article finds its way to university-level research, focusing on MIT. There, the author found interesting work on superhydrophobic coatings (Kripa Varanasi), genetic engineering of viruses to synthesize batteries (Angela Belcher) and computational discovery of new materials (Gerbrand Ceder, who first coined the term “materials genome”).

The article is clearly written by a non-scientist and is intended for non-scientists, too. But, it’s interesting to see how laymen translate our world into theirs.

The article appeared in the print April 21 issue, which had a series of articles on manufacturing and innovation.

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Credit: Katie Fehrenbacher, GigaOm.

Bloom Energy is making a big push to establish a foothold along the Eastern Seaboard. Today, Bloom is holding a ground-breaking ceremony a its new “Bloom Box” solid oxide fuel cell manufacturing plant in Newark, Delaware, at a site that was once a Chrysler assembly plant (Bloom’s other manufacturing is in California, and this essentially doubles the company’s capacity). The company also announced several new customers in the East.

Plans for the Delaware manufacturing hub were actually revealed last summer, and the hope then was that the facility would employ 900. No specific job numbers were mentioned in today’s announcement, but the numbers discussed in 2011 are in line with the number of workers at Bloom’s California facility.

Interestingly, the property is owned by the University of Delaware, which is also developing a Science and Technology Campus on grounds, and the hope is that the Bloom facility will provide an anchor for the campus.

One of the deal-sealers for this development is an agreement between Bloom and Delmarva Power & Light, an East Coast utility,  for a whopping 30 MW of Bloom Boxes.

The company also announced several new customers, including Owens Corning, Urban Outfitters, Washington Gas and AT&T (the latter already uses Bloom units in California facilities). Stories surfaced in March that Apple also had reached a deal to install Bloom energy servers in a North Carolina facility.

The company also is rolling out a new line of SOFC units that, according to the company, feature a 20 percent gain in efficiency and double the energy density (based on footprint of the installation).

It also touts that the fuel cells change the energy paradigm for their customers in that the Bloom Boxes will provide the basic power for the companies’ core operations. In other words, instead of the electrical grid providing the basic power and the fuel cells providing backup power, the SOFCs become the primary source and the grid becomes the backup.

Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm has the story in an interesting post and the above video interview with Bloom’s Asim Hussein, the company’s director of product marketing.

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