Dear all
Another eventful month especially in the field of critical materials: a flurry of innovations on the path towards affordable and high performance EVs (lithium iron, silicon anodes or advanced aqueous batteries) but also the breakthrough idea of peer to peer charging developed by the department of electrical and computer engineering at University of Florida in order to make the batteries no longer the bottleneck to electrified mobility...
Some new angles as well at the policy and strategy levels with the mining industry appealing to more states and/or more car makers’ involvement in order to support the long investment cycles in high quality ores of critical materials.
Microwave plasma is also back in the race with a new jet propulsion technology coming from Wuhan University or a new technology of metal powder feedstocks for additive manufacturing and the production of advanced batteries by a start up rooted at MIT... And some interesting results at Penn State with graphene used as an additive for making carbon fibers lower cost and stronger.
On the sustainability front, we picked two examples this month, this of Beiersdorf and Evonik developing CO2 as a raw material for beauty products on an industrial scale and this of John Schramski at University of Georgia proposing to focus our efforts on reducing food related energy consumption much more than on accelerating transition to renewable energy...
And finally some good news (be deals, awards, fundings, new product launches or papers) coming from our WMF start up alumni with Ajelis (France), BComp (Switzerland), Carbios (France), Fluency Analytics (USA), Genes’Ink (France), Imagine Intelligent Materials (Australia), Membrasenz (Switzerland), Opus 12 (USA), Polyspectra (USA) and Safi Organics (Kenya). Wishing as always that you enjoy the reading.
