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From the minuscule may come big things
by: Peter Key
It costs around $20,000 per pound to build a satellite and $50,000 per pound to launch one into space. That's why NASA is very happy to cough up big money for materials that can make satellites lighter but equally as strong. Which brings us to Cynthia Kuper. After earning her doctorate in physical chemistry from Temple University in 1999, the Philadelphia native headed out to Rice University in Houston for a year to work with Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley on studying the chemistry of carbon nanotubes. One-billionth of a meter in diameter and one-millionth of a meter long, the extremely small forms of pure carbon have some unusual properties: They're 100 times stronger than steel, but weigh one-sixth as much and conduct electricity like a metal. They're rather hard to work with, because the two ways of making them produce something that looks like black dust. But Kuper's year-old company Versilant Nanotechnologies LLC has a contract to work with them. Specifically, it has a deal to make a composite material for NASA consisting of carbon nanotubes and polymers. Kuper said the company, which she and her fiancé bankrolled, wants to deliver the substance to NASA in sheet form. Assuming it can, it probably will license off the technology used to make the composite to a company that can turn it out on a large scale. Among other things, the composite could be used to replace graphite-epoxy composites used in cars, planes, boats and satellites. Creating carbon nanotubes is just one area of nanotechnology, which consists of working with science and technology at the level of atoms and molecules. The field gets its name from the nanometer, a measurement that is one-billionth of a meter in size. It's considered by many to be the science of the future and Kuper said that while working with Smalley, her goal became to establish it in Philadelphia. "Through many conversations with the people who are now advisors to Versilant, we turned it into a business," she said. Source: Philadelphia Business Journal March 30, 2001 Author: Peter Key |