Purdue’s Trask Innovation Fund has committed $50,000 each to short-term research projects into sodium-ion batteries and a handheld plant scanner, in addition to $21,000 for a data security project.
Purdue University announced Wednesday that it had invested a total of $121,000 from its Trask Innovation Fund in three research projects, targeting the commercialisation of energy storage, crop health and health-orientated data security applications.
Trask Innovation Fund is managed by Purdue’s tech transfer affiliate, Purdue Research Foundation (PRF), to help short-term projects based on innovation disclosures to the PRF’s Office of Technology Commercialisation (OTC).
The investments include $50,000 for a project attempting to devise sodium-ion batteries that use cheap sodium metals rather than the valuable lithium found in most conventional batteries today.
Vilas Pol, an associate professor in Purdue’s Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, is leading the project and will aim to overcome technical barriers including a tendency for sodium ions to adhere to the battery anode during initial charging cycles.
Another $50,000 has been invested in a handheld scanning sensor for plants that exploits hyperspectral-imaging to measure health indicators including moisture, nutrients and disease symptoms, building on research led by Jian Jin, an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.
Finally, Trask Innovation Fund has put $21,000 behind a data security project helmed by Mohammad Rahman, associate professor in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue.
Rahman’s team will look to develop technology that enables enterprises to process and transfer information stored within secured ledgers, which lock all sensitive data to prevent confidential information from being passed on either externally or within the application.
The concept could give healthcare patients greater assurance that their personal information will remain safe when switching to a different provider.
News of the investments comes as PRF prepares to tweak the format of its Trask Innovation Fund to place greater emphasis on technologies with commercial potential.
The restructuring will divide Trask’s investments into three categories; two tracks will be dedicated to life sciences and physical sciences respectively, while a separate stream will fund researchers either poised to form a business or else in possession of an executed option agreement with the OTC for their technology.
