Commercializing Research
April / May 2010
Volume 8 Number 2
Sometimes there’s a gap between research conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory and what’s needed to turn that research into commercial technology. Bart Raeymaekers’ job is to fill that gap. As the lab’s first entrepreneurial postdoctoral fellow, Raeymaekers has a two-year appointment that integrates postdoctoral research with commercialization endeavors. The program aims to respond to a national trend among students in graduate science programs to look beyond the conventional career tracks for science Ph.D.s.
“Since internally funded research and development in industry have been dramatically reduced, innovation in technology increasingly happens at small companies, in universities, and at national laboratories,” said Belinda Padilla, program manager for the lab’s technology transfer organization. “The time is prime at LANL for an innovative program that responds to this trend.”
Dipen Sinha, head of the lab’s acoustics and sensors group and Raeymaekers’ supervisor, believes that Raeymaekers can illuminate a pathway to turning good research into either a product or useful technology that can benefit society. “He has already identified a couple of projects that can lead to some very interesting biomedical diagnostic instruments, despite the fact that those projects were originally aimed at completely different applications,” Sinha said.
Raeymaekers, who holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of California at San Diego and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to the United States in 2004 on a fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation. While at MIT, he acquired operational experience at a web 2.0 startup specializing in online video search capability and cofounded a startup that provided quantitative trade-optimization services to institutional investors.
“The combination of a Ph.D. in engineering and an MBA provides me with the educational background to do innovative research, as well as commercialize technology,” Raeymaekers said. “In addition, it allows me to look at a business idea from both a technical and a commercial angle. The exciting part of this entrepreneurial postdoc position is that I can focus on doing innovative research but at the same time think about creating useful applications and marketable products.”
On the job since October, Raeymaekers has come up with new ideas that combine what he’s learned at the lab with his previous thesis research. “One idea, if it pans out, will have a significant impact on magnetic recording technology,” Sinha said.
A former semiprofessional cyclist with 13 peer-reviewed journal papers to his name, Raeymaekers hopes that his research results in innovations that eventually reach commercialization and generate a revenue stream. “I also want to learn about licensing and intellectual property strategy,” he said. “I very much like attacking problems that have not been solved before. My goal is to do a startup company, hopefully with technology that is a result of the research I performed.”
According to Padilla, the ultimate goal of the entrepreneurial postdoc program is to produce graduates equipped to build the next generation of high-tech success stories. “Success,” she said, “will be achieved through an applied approach that allows our trainees to immediately contribute to regional and national commercialization successes.”
Currently, he is juggling two projects. The first involves ultrasonic sensor technology to image objects in highly attenuating media, which finds application in the energy industry and biomedical engineering. The second, which is his main focus, is the attempt to use acoustic manipulation to create user-defined patterns of nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes.
“We’ve been able to use bulk acoustic waves in a solution of water and nano-particles to create concentric circles and a rectangular array of 5-nanometer diamond nano-spheres,” Raeymaekers said. “We can tune the shape of the arrays and spacing between the particles, and fixate those patterns in a binder material, or deposit them on a substrate.”
While much work has been done on using surface acoustic wave devices to manipulate micro-particles, Raeymaekers is not aware of anyone else who has organized nanoparticles in patterns using bulk wave acoustic manipulation.
“The applications for this technology are abundant, and one could think of it as a ‘platform technology.’ It opens the door to a whole new way of thinking about nano-manufacturing,” he said. “It can be used to align carbon nanotubes for structural reinforcement, seed planting for nano-wire growth, or even manufacturing of meta-materials.”
Raeymaekers’ focus is magnetic recording. “We’re applying this technique to develop a new method of manufacturing bit-patterned magnetic recording media by arranging ferromagnetic particles in a nonmagnetic binder material. So we closely pack the recording bits without the problem of magnetic cross-talk,” he said. Currently these recording media are manufactured using expensive techniques such as nano-lithography and nano-imprint technology.
Research by Sinha on acoustic manipulation of micro-particles began at the laboratory almost 15 years ago. Initially, the purpose was to develop a sensor that can concentrate particles floating in air and detect any biological hazards. Most sensors don’t have the sensitivity to detect a few particles floating in a large open area. So the acoustic particle concentrator was meant to enhance the sensitivity of existing sensors. This device was developed for biological weapons detection, according to Sinha. Research also was conducted to concentrate and characterize biological cells using acoustic concentration. This led to development of a commercial product licensed as the acoustic flow cytometer, involving researchers Greg Kaduchak, Mike Ward and Greg Goddard of Sinha's team.
?At about the same time, Sinha, along with Goddard and Naveen Sinha, developed a way to generate with sound waves various patterns of particles in a volume of fluid (e.g., epoxy) inside a resonator cavity (e.g., a hollow cylinder, or a rectangular-shaped container) and then freeze these patterns permanently as the epoxy dried or cured by UV light. “For years, not much work was done to pursue this till Bart Raeymaekers joined my team,” Sinha said.
When Raeymaekers learned about this idea of creating and freezing an acoustically driven pattern, he came up with the idea to use it for magnetic recording where nanoparticles of magnetic materials could be frozen on a disc. He then carried out experiments with nano-particles and found that it was possible to create patterns of nano-sized particles resulting from acoustic radiation pressure. “Previously all my work dealt with micron-sized particles,” Sinha said. “He is the first to try nano-particles in a very simple way without using fancy surface acoustic wave devices.”
Typically, patterning nano-particles requires an expensively equipped laboratory, said Sinha. “We’ve shown that a very inexpensive table-top system (costing less than a thousand dollars) can be used to manipulate and create intricate patterns of nano-particles using ultrasound in the 1 to 5 MHz frequency range. This opens up a lot of possibilities, including a new field of research where almost anyone can study these materials.
Mig Owens is a communications specialist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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