Hindered Polyurea literally fills in the gaps in manufacturing some materials

This is one in a series of features on competitors in the 2016 Cozad New Venture competition, a program sponsored by the University of Illinois' Technology Entrepreneur Center that is designed to encourage students to create new businesses. The competition process offers teams assistance in the form of: mentors to help guide them through the phases of venture creation, workshops to help with idea validation, pitching skills, and customer development, and courses to enhance their skills and knowledge. Teams who make it to the final round of competition will have the opportunity to meet with venture capitalists, early stage investors and successful entrepreneurs who serve as judges. The judges will determine teams that will present their ventures at the finals event. Last year, these teams competed for nearly $160,000 in funding and in-kind prizes.

Building semiconductors, orthopedic implants and hydrogen fuel cells are just a few of the potential uses of a polymer created in the lab of Jianjun Cheng, a materials science and engineering professor at the University of Illinois.

Cheng and Hanze Ying, a fifth-year graduate student in Cheng’s lab, created the Hindered Polyurea material two years ago, but Ying and a team of undergraduates recently discovered that in addition to its self-healing qualities its sacrificial properties give it added commercial appeal.

“We called the new polymer a ‘Hindered’ polyurea because we put an extra functional group to the existing urea chemistry to make it so,” Ying said. “It’s this ‘hinderedness’ that makes it dynamic.”

The team is now set to commercialize the technology, focusing first on the sacrificial properties of the polymer: the fact that the urea bond is stable at room temperature, but vaporizes when heated to 150 degrees Celsius.

“The technology is especially useful when you want to create empty channels inside of bulk materials,” Ying said. “We realized our technology could solve many of the existing problems in fabrication.”

In manufacturing semiconductors, for instance, there need to be channels within the circuitry. Using Ying’s technology, the semiconductor would be layered around the polymer then heated up, causing the Hindered Polyurea material to vaporize and leaving holes inside the semiconductor.

While a similar method is currently employed in this kind of fabrication, the common materials used, such as polystyrene or polycarbonate, need to be heated up to 400 degrees Celsius and leave behind a residue that can cause other complications.

“Our technology is not revolutionizing the concept, but it’s an evolution - the next step forward for getting the process to be cleaner and cheaper,” said Manas Gosavi, an undergraduate student in the lab and a principal in the commercialization of the technology.  “The existing degradable materials need a higher temperature to vaporize, severely limiting what external materials you can use.  For other materials, you need a strong original base, but for our material, it’s much easier.”

Another application targeted for the technology is for titanium orthopedic implants.

“One issue doctors are facing is that if you make the artificial joint out of a solid block of titanium with welding edges and other imperfections from putting separate sections together, the body recognizes it as a foreign object and might reject it,” Gosavi said. “If you make it porous, like a honeycomb structure, the osteoblast cells from your bone go inside the titanium material and incorporate it into the bone in a process called osteointegration. They start developing their own structures within those pores.”

Yet another application is the production of hydrogen fuel cells, which might be highly in demand to power future automobiles.

“You need channels within each fuel cell to allow liquid to flow through for convection cooling to lower the temperature of the battery.” Ying said.

Although the team is focusing on the sacrificial applications at the onset, the group certainly sees many future applications for Hindered Polyurea as a self-healing material, especially in structures that see a lot of fatigue and stress such as bridges and fuel tanks.

“A lot self-healing materials need some sort of catalyst to work,” Ying said, “Our technology self heals at room temperature. The traditional Polyurea material is very stable and strong, which is good, but there isn’t much dynamicity.”

Cheng is one of the first professors chosen for the Faculty Entrepreneurial Fellowship, a program sponsored by the College of Engineering that gives selected faculty the time to propel their technology from a research phase to a commercial phase. It releases its recipients from classroom duty, and specifically targets faculty that have a healthy team of students in their research lab.  Ying says that the FEF program gave the team the resources to recruit more undergraduates and some master’s students to join the effort.

Hindered Polyurea is one of 18 finalists in the Cozad New Venture Challenge, sponsored by the University of Illinois Technology Entrepreneur Center. They will make their final pitches to judges as part of the Entrepreneurship Forum April 28 at the Illini Union. The team is still in material development stage, prototyping some empty channels and integrating it into some of the existing products. It is using Cozad to determine the niche market, narrow the specific target applications, and develop a business plan.

“Cozad allowed us to find the right questions to ask,” Ying said. “First, it narrowed down what research we needed to do from a commercialization prospective. Secondly, it allowed us to get our name out there.”

“At a mass production level, we were looking at some basic pricing,” Gosavi said. “So far, we have found our material to be cheaper, more efficient and cleaner than our competitors. The difference in all three of those segments between our technology and existing materials is big enough that if we can get to a level of scale and if we can market it, I think it is something that would be adopted and would really change a lot of industries.”