It’s been a big couple of months for materials science funding in the United States. TMR+ rounds up the key announcements.

Flexible hybrid electronics
AUG 2015 – the US Department of Defense (US DOD) has awarded $75 million to the Flextech Alliance to establish and manage a Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute (FHEMII).

The Flextech Alliance has created a map (JPEG format) of its 150+ partner network, which clusters around nano-bio; flex substrates; design, modelling and testing; equipment and materials; deposition and printing; CMOS thinning; packaging; and standards.

According to the announcement, the funding, which runs for five years, will be matched by more than $96 million in cost sharing from non-federal sources, including the City of San Jose, private companies, universities, several U.S. states, and not-for-profit organizations.

Beyond defence applications, other markets for flexible hybrid electronics include automotive, communications, consumer electronics, medical devices, health care, transportation and logistics, and agriculture.

Nanotechnology
SEP 2015 – the US National Science Foundation (NSF) is providing $81 million over five years to support 16 sites and a coordinating office as part of a new National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI).

The NNCI framework is the successor to the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), which – as the program synopsis outlines – provided researchers from academia, small and large companies, and government with open access to university user facilities with leading-edge fabrication and characterization tools, instrumentation, and expertise within all disciplines of nanoscale science, engineering, and technology.

Advanced materials translation
SEP 2015 – Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) is the NSF’s ‘primary program’ for participating in the Materials Genome Initiative – a multi-agency initiative to accelerate advanced materials discovery and deployment by exploiting advances in computational techniques, and making more effective use of standards, and enhanced data management.

Recognizing the multi-disciplinary nature of the task, DMREF reaches across various NSF directorates including Mathematical and Physical Sciences; Engineering; and Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

DMREF funding consists of 20 – 25 grants of between $750,000 and $1,600,000 to develop, for example, new data analytic tools and statistical algorithms; advanced simulations of material properties in conjunction with new device functionality; advances in predictive modeling that leverage machine learning and data mining; and new collaborative capabilities for managing large, complex, heterogeneous and distributed data.

Related stories on TMR+
– Materials by design: NIST announces consortium to speed up time from discovery to first commercial use
– Show report: IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe 2015 (Berlin)

Eurekite, an advanced materials spin-off from the University of Twente in the Netherlands that refers to its non-brittle, nanofibre-based products as ‘flexiramics’, has attracted a EURO 1 million investment from Cottonwood – a US venture capital (VC) firm with a European hub in Twente’s largest city, Enschede. The university start-up plans to use the VC funding to deliver prototypes based on its 100% ceramic materials, which were first developed at the MESA+ Institute of Nanotechnology, and to scale-up its operation.

“We have created a material that merges the properties of paper and ceramics,” says Eurekite co-founder Bahruz Mammadov (COO/CFO) who formed the company less than a year ago together with Gerard Cadafalch (CEO). Andre ten Elshof, a senior faculty member at MESA+, joins them as chief scientific officer. The team has strong connections to research programmes at the University of Twente investigating the properties of electrospun ceramic nanofibers. Based on promising results in the lab, the team decided to explore commercial opportunities for these tough and flexible nanomaterials.

Like conventional ceramics, Eurekite’s products don’t burn, but as the name suggests ‘flexiramics’ are much less fragile than traditional formulations and don’t shatter when dropped. The team hopes that this rugged combination of properties will inspire designers, and potential applications include high-temperature oil & gas sensors, flexible substrates for mobile phone antennas, lithium-ion battery energy performance upgrades, high-power electronics for electric vehicles and solar energy – to name just a few uses for ‘flexiramics’!

Ecosystem built for translation
As TMR+ witnessed on a tour of the region back in 2013, the University of Twente offers a healthy ecosystem for translating materials research from the laboratory through to the market. In addition to MESA+, local facilities include a prototyping environment (NanoLab) and the nearby High Tech Factory where early-stage companies can ramp-up to higher production volumes.

Related stories on TMR+
– The dash for cash: a new funding landscape for high-tech start-ups
– Gearing up for the commercialization of micro- and nanotechnologies

Related articles from the journal Translational Materials Research (TMR)
– Sizing up your innovation ecosystem (Deborah Jackson 2014 Transl. Mater. Res. 1 020301)
– Rethinking universities as innovation factories (Ralph M Ford et al 2014 Transl. Mater. Res. 1 016002)
– A lab-to-market roadmap for early-stage entrepreneurship (Jesko von Windheim and Barry Myers 2014 Transl. Mater. Res. 1 016001)

There’s plenty of talk about the hurdles that scientists have to overcome to commercialize their research, and while there’s nothing wrong in recognizing the scale of the challenge, it’s important to celebrate the success stories too. The Royal Society strikes a positive note in its recent video featuring Nanoco, Solexa and ARM, which offers advice on translating technology from the lab to the market.

Winning investment
The speakers are well placed to comment on the journey from discovery to devices, and each of them discusses different pieces of the puzzle, which includes raising money.

In the clip, Paul O’Brien, a professor at the University of Manchester and co-founder of Nanoco, emphasizes that the trickiest part to get funded is the step between invention and product development. To grab the attention of potential backers, it helps to think like one.

“The pull for the investor is the potential for a market,” O’Brien explains in the video. “So, if you can point towards a market like displays and say that [your product] could be in every house, in every country in the world, then they start to look interested.”

– You can find more videos from the Royal Society on its YouTube page

For additional case studies, check out the following articles from the journal Translational Materials Research –

Optical coatings for automotive applications: a case study in translating fundamental materials science into commercial reality – Manrico Fabretto et al, Transl. Mater. Res. 1 025001

Photocatalytic nanomats clean up produced water from fracking – P I Gouma and J Lee, Transl. Mater. Res. 1 025002

A lab-to-market roadmap for early-stage entrepreneurship – Jesko von Windheim and Barry Myers, Transl. Mater. Res. 1 016001