The new company will manufacture commercially useful quantities of fullerenes in a cost-effective manner.
Isis Innovation, the university’s technology transfer company, has established the company Designer Carbon Materials, which is hoping to manufacture carbon nanomaterials cost-effectively and in commercial quantities. Investment in the company has been led by Oxford Technology and the Oxford Invention Fund.
Designer Carbon Materials will be specifically focusing on a carbon nanomaterial called fullerene, or bucky-balls. It is one of two types of carbon nanomaterial, the other one being carbon nanotubes. The informal name bucky-balls stems from its truncated icosahedron structure, which is that of a standard association football – in other words, a spherical shape made up of 12 pentagonal and 20 hexagonal faces.
The material has, until now, proven to be supremely difficult to manufacture in meaningful quantities. The company is based on research by Kyriakos Porfyrakis from the Department of Materials, and the manufacturing process has been patented by Isis Innovation.
Dr Porfyrakis explained that their research could lead to solar cells exceeding the current 10% limit in efficiency, and added: “The materials could also be developed as superior MRI contrast agents for medical imaging and as diagnostics for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as they are able to detect the presence of superoxide free radical molecules which may cause these conditions.”
