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    Technology developed by MIT engineers makes pesticides stick to plant leaves

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    Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — could cut down the amount of polluting runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.A team of researchers at MIT and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash PhD ’22 and Sreedath Panat PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.Pesticides take a significant toll on global health and the environment, the researchers point out. A recent study found that 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution. And agricultural chemicals are a major expense for farmers: In the U.S., they spend $16 billion a year just on pesticides.Making spraying more efficient is one of the best ways to make food production more sustainable and economical. Agricultural spraying essentially boils down to mixing chemicals into water and spraying water droplets onto plant leaves, which are often inherently water-repellent. “Over more than a decade of research in my lab at MIT, we have developed fundamental understandings of spraying and the interaction between droplets and plants — studying when they bounce and all the ways we have to make them stick better and enhance coverage,” Varanasi says.The team had previously found a way to reduce the amount of sprayed liquid that bounces away from the leaves it strikes, which involved using two spray nozzles instead of one and spraying mixtures with opposite electrical charges. But they found that farmers were reluctant to take on the expense and effort of converting their spraying equipment to a two-nozzle system. So, the team looked for a simpler alternative.They discovered they could achieve the same improvement in droplet retention using a single-nozzle system that can be easily adapted to existing sprayers. Instead of giving the droplets of pesticide an electric charge, they coat each droplet with a vanishingly thin layer of an oily material.In their new study, they conducted lab experiments with high-speed cameras. When they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. But when the researchers coated the surface of the droplets with a tiny amount of oil — making up less than 1 percent of the droplet’s liquid — the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.“When these droplets are hitting the surface and as they expand, they form this oil ring that essentially pins the droplet to the surface,” Rufer says. The researchers tried a wide variety of conditions, he says, explaining that they conducted hundreds of experiments, “with different impact velocities, different droplet sizes, different angles of inclination, all the things that fully characterize this phenomenon.” Though different oils varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. “Regardless of the impact velocity and the oils, we saw that the rebound height was significantly lower,” he says.The effect works with remarkably small amounts of oil. In their initial tests they used 1 percent oil compared to the water, then they tried a 0.1 percent, and even .01. The improvement in droplets sticking to the surface continued at a 0.1 percent, but began to break down beyond that. “Basically, this oil film acts as a way to trap that droplet on the surface, because oil is very attracted to the surface and sort of holds the water in place,” Rufer says.In the researchers’ initial tests they used soybean oil for the coating, figuring this would be a familiar material for the farmers they were working with, many of whom were growing soybeans. But it turned out that though they were producing the beans, the oil was not part of their usual supply chain for use on the farm. In further tests, the researchers found that several chemicals that farmers were already routinely using in their spraying, called surfactants and adjuvants, could be used instead, and that some of these provided the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.“That way,” Varanasi says, “we’re not introducing a new chemical or changed chemistries into their field, but they’re using things they’ve known for a long time.”Varanasi and Jayaprakash formed a company called AgZen to commercialize the system. In order to prove how much their coating system improves the amount of spray that stays on the plant, they first had to develop a system to monitor spraying in real time. That system, which they call RealCoverage, has been deployed on farms ranging in size from a few dozen acres to hundreds of thousands of acres, and many different crop types, and has saved farmers 30 to 50 percent on their pesticide expenditures, just by improving the controls on the existing sprays. That system is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in 2025, the company says, including some in California, Texas, the Midwest, France and Italy. Adding the cloaking system using new nozzles, the researchers say, should yield at least another doubling of efficiency.“You could give back a billion dollars to U.S. growers if you just saved 6 percent of their pesticide budget,” says Jayaprakash, lead author of the research paper and CEO of AgZen. “In the lab we got 300 percent of extra product on the plant. So that means we could get orders of magnitude reductions in the amount of pesticides that farmers are spraying.”Farmers had already been using these surfactant and adjuvant chemicals as a way to enhance spraying effectiveness, but they were mixing it with a water solution. For it to have any effect, they had to use much more of these materials, risking causing burns to the plants. The new coating system reduces the amount of these materials needed, while improving their effectiveness.In field tests conducted by AgZen, “we doubled the amount of product on kale and soybeans just by changing where the adjuvant was,” from mixed in to being a coating, Jayaprakash says. It’s convenient for farmers because “all they’re doing is changing their nozzle. They’re getting all their existing chemicals to work better, and they’re getting more product on the plant.”And it’s not just for pesticides. “The really cool thing is this is useful for every chemistry that’s going on the leaf, be it an insecticide, a herbicide, a fungicide, or foliar nutrition,” Varanasi says. This year, they plan to introduce the new spray system on about 30,000 acres of cropland.Varanasi says that with projected world population growth, “the amount of food production has got to double, and we are limited in so many resources, for example we cannot double the arable land. … This means that every acre we currently farm must become more efficient and able to do more with less.” These improved spraying technologies, for both monitoring the spraying and coating the droplets, Varanasi says, “I think is fundamentally changing agriculture.”AgZen has recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture. “The knowledge we are gathering from every leaf, combined with our expertise in interfacial science and fluid mechanics, is giving us unparalleled insights into how chemicals are used and developed — and it’s clear that we can deliver value across the entire agrochemical supply chain,” Varanasi says  “Our mission is to use these technologies to deliver improved outcomes and reduced costs for the ag industry.”  More

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      Making solar projects cheaper and faster with portable factories

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      As the price of solar panels has plummeted in recent decades, installation costs have taken up a greater share of the technology’s overall price tag. The long installation process for solar farms is also emerging as a key bottleneck in the deployment of solar energy.Now the startup Charge Robotics is developing solar installation factories to speed up the process of building large-scale solar farms. The company’s factories are shipped to the site of utility solar projects, where equipment including tracks, mounting brackets, and panels are fed into the system and automatically assembled. A robotic vehicle autonomously puts the finished product — which amounts to a completed section of solar farm — in its final place.“We think of this as the Henry Ford moment for solar,” says CEO Banks Hunter ’15, who founded Charge Robotics with fellow MIT alumnus Max Justicz ’17. “We’re going from a very bespoke, hands on, manual installation process to something much more streamlined and set up for mass manufacturing. There are all kinds of benefits that come along with that, including consistency, quality, speed, cost, and safety.”Last year, solar energy accounted for 81 percent of new electric capacity in the U.S., and Hunter and Justicz see their factories as necessary for continued acceleration in the industry.The founders say they were met with skepticism when they first unveiled their plans. But in the beginning of last year, they deployed a prototype system that successfully built a solar farm with SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar installers in the U.S. Now, Charge has raised $22 million for its first commercial deployments later this year.From surgical robots to solar robotsWhile majoring in mechanical engineering at MIT, Hunter found plenty of excuses to build things. One such excuse was Course 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes), where he and his classmates built a smart watch for communication in remote areas.After graduation, Hunter worked for the MIT alumni-founded startups Shaper Tools and Vicarious Surgical. Vicarious Surgical is a medical robotics company that has raised more than $450 million to date. Hunter was the second employee and worked there for five years.“A lot of really hands on, project-based classes at MIT translated directly into my first roles coming out of school and set me up to be very independent and run large engineering projects,” Hunter says, “Course 2.009, in particular, was a big launch point for me. The founders of Vicarious Surgical got in touch with me through the 2.009 network.”As early as 2017, Hunter and Justicz, who majored in mechanical engineering and computer science, had discussed starting a company together. But they had to decide where to apply their broad engineering and product skillsets.“Both of us care a lot about climate change. We see climate change as the biggest problem impacting the greatest number of people on the planet,” Hunter says. “Our mentality was if we can build anything, we might as well build something that really matters.”In the process of cold calling hundreds of people in the energy industry, the founders decided solar was the future of energy production because its price was decreasing so quickly.“It’s becoming cheaper faster than any other form of energy production in human history,” Hunter says.When the founders began visiting construction sites for the large, utility-scale solar farms that make up the bulk of energy generation, it wasn’t hard to find the bottlenecks. The first site they traveled to was in the Mojave Desert in California. Hunter describes it as a massive dust bowl where thousands of workers spent months repeating tasks like moving material and assembling the same parts, over and over again.“The site had something like 2 million panels on it, and every single one was assembled and fastened the same way by hand,” Hunter says. “Max and I thought it was insane. There’s no way that can scale to transform the energy grid in a short window of time.”Hunter says he heard from each of the largest solar companies in the U.S. that their biggest limitation for scaling was labor shortages. The problem was slowing growth and killing projects.Hunter and Justicz founded Charge Robotics in 2021 to break through that bottleneck. Their first step was to order utility solar parts and assemble them by hand in their backyards.“From there, we came up with this portable assembly line that we could ship out to construction sites and then feed in the entire solar system, including the steel tracks, mounting brackets, fasteners, and the solar panels,” Hunter explains. “The assembly line robotically assembles all those pieces to produce completed solar bays, which are chunks of a solar farm.”

      Charge Robotics’ machine transports an autonomously assembled portion of solar farm to its final place in a solar farm.

      Credit: Courtesy of Charge Robotics

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      Each bay represents a 40-foot piece of the solar farm and weighs about 800 pounds. A robotic vehicle brings it to its final location in the field. Hunter says Charge’s system automates all mechanical installation except for the process of pile driving the first metal stakes into the ground.Charge’s assembly lines also have machine-vision systems that scan each part to ensure quality, and the systems work with the most common solar parts and panel sizes.From pilot to productWhen the founders started pitching their plans to investors and construction companies, people didn’t believe it was possible.“The initial feedback was basically, ‘This will never work,’” Hunter says. “But as soon as we took our first system out into the field and people saw it operating, they got much more excited and started believing it was real.”Since that first deployment, Charge’s team has been making its system faster and easier to operate. The company plans to set up its factories at project sites and run them in partnership with solar construction companies. The factories could even run alongside human workers.“With our system, people are operating robotic equipment remotely rather than putting in the screws themselves,” Hunter explains. “We can essentially deliver the assembled solar to customers. Their only responsibility is to deliver the materials and parts on big pallets that we feed into our system.”Hunter says multiple factories could be deployed at the same site and could also operate 24/7 to dramatically speed up projects.“We are hitting the limits of solar growth because these companies don’t have enough people,” Hunter says. “We can build much bigger sites much faster with the same number of people by just shipping out more of our factories. It’s a fundamentally new way of scaling solar energy.” More

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      in Energy

      MIT spinout Gradiant reduces companies’ water use and waste by billions of gallons each day

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      When it comes to water use, most of us think of the water we drink. But industrial uses for things like manufacturing account for billions of gallons of water each day. For instance, making a single iPhone, by one estimate, requires more than 3,000 gallons.Gradiant is working to reduce the world’s industrial water footprint. Founded by a team from MIT, Gradiant offers water recycling, treatment, and purification solutions to some of the largest companies on Earth, including Coca Cola, Tesla, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. By serving as an end-to-end water company, Gradiant says it helps companies reuse 2 billion gallons of water each day and saves another 2 billion gallons of fresh water from being withdrawn.The company’s mission is to preserve water for generations to come in the face of rising global demand.“We work on both ends of the water spectrum,” Gradiant co-founder and CEO Anurag Bajpayee SM ’08, PhD ’12 says. “We work with ultracontaminated water, and we can also provide ultrapure water for use in areas like chip fabrication. Our specialty is in the extreme water challenges that can’t be solved with traditional technologies.”For each customer, Gradiant builds tailored water treatment solutions that combine chemical treatments with membrane filtration and biological process technologies, leveraging a portfolio of patents to drastically cut water usage and waste.“Before Gradiant, 40 million liters of water would be used in the chip-making process. It would all be contaminated and treated, and maybe 30 percent would be reused,” explains Gradiant co-founder and COO Prakash Govindan PhD ’12. “We have the technology to recycle, in some cases, 99 percent of the water. Now, instead of consuming 40 million liters, chipmakers only need to consume 400,000 liters, which is a huge shift in the water footprint of that industry. And this is not just with semiconductors. We’ve done this in food and beverage, we’ve done this in renewable energy, we’ve done this in pharmaceutical drug production, and several other areas.”Learning the value of waterGovindan grew up in a part of India that experienced a years-long drought beginning when he was 10. Without tap water, one of Govindan’s chores was to haul water up the stairs of his apartment complex each time a truck delivered it.“However much water my brother and I could carry was how much we had for the week,” Govindan recalls. “I learned the value of water the hard way.”Govindan attended the Indian Institute of Technology as an undergraduate, and when he came to MIT for his PhD, he sought out the groups working on water challenges. He began working on a water treatment method called carrier gas extraction for his PhD under Gradiant co-founder and MIT Professor John Lienhard.Bajpayee also worked on water treatment methods at MIT, and after brief stints as postdocs at MIT, he and Govindan licensed their work and founded Gradiant.Carrier gas extraction became Gradiant’s first proprietary technology when the company launched in 2013. The founders began by treating wastewater created by oil and gas wells, landing their first partner in a Texas company. But Gradiant gradually expanded to solving water challenges in power generation, mining, textiles, and refineries. Then the founders noticed opportunities in industries like electronics, semiconductors, food and beverage, and pharmaceuticals. Today, oil and gas wastewater treatment makes up a small percentage of Gradiant’s work.As the company expanded, it added technologies to its portfolio, patenting new water treatment methods around reverse osmosis, selective contaminant extraction, and free radical oxidation. Gradiant has also created a digital system that uses AI to measure, predict, and control water treatment facilities.“The advantage Gradiant has over every other water company is that R&D is in our DNA,” Govindan says, noting Gradiant has a world-class research lab at its headquarters in Boston. “At MIT, we learned how to do cutting-edge technology development, and we never let go of that.”The founders compare their suite of technologies to LEGO bricks they can mix and match depending on a customer’s water needs. Gradiant has built more than 2,500 of these end-to-end systems for customers around the world.“Our customers aren’t water companies; they are industrial clients like semiconductor manufacturers, drug companies, and food and beverage companies,” Bajpayee says. “They aren’t about to start operating a water treatment plant. They look at us as their water partner who can take care of the whole water problem.”Continuing innovationThe founders say Gradiant has been roughly doubling its revenue each year over the last five years, and it’s continuing to add technologies to its platform. For instance, Gradiant recently developed a critical minerals recovery solution to extract materials like lithium and nickel from customers’ wastewater, which could expand access to critical materials essential to the production of batteries and other products.“If we can extract lithium from brine water in an environmentally and economically feasible way, the U.S. can meet all of its lithium needs from within the U.S.,” Bajpayee says. “What’s preventing large-scale extraction of lithium from brine is technology, and we believe what we have now deployed will open the floodgates for direct lithium extraction and completely revolutionized the industry.”The company has also validated a method for eliminating PFAS — so-called toxic “forever chemicals” — in a pilot project with a leading U.S. semiconductor manufacturer. In the near future, it hopes to bring that solution to municipal water treatment plants to protect cities.At the heart of Gradiant’s innovation is the founders’ belief that industrial activity doesn’t have to deplete one of the world’s most vital resources.“Ever since the industrial revolution, we’ve been taking from nature,” Bajpayee says. “By treating and recycling water, by reducing water consumption and making industry highly water efficient, we have this unique opportunity to turn the clock back and give nature water back. If that’s your driver, you can’t choose not to innovate.” More

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      in Environment

      A vision for U.S. science success

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      White House science advisor Arati Prabhakar expressed confidence in U.S. science and technology capacities during a talk on Wednesday about major issues the country must tackle.“Let me start with the purpose of science and technology and innovation, which is to open possibilities so that we can achieve our great aspirations,” said Prabhakar, who is the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and a co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). “The aspirations that we have as a country today are as great as they have ever been,” she added.Much of Prabhakar’s talk focused on three major issues in science and technology development: cancer prevention, climate change, and AI. In the process, she also emphasized the necessity for the U.S. to sustain its global leadership in research across domains of science and technology, which she called “one of America’s long-time strengths.”“Ever since the end of the Second World War, we said we’re going in on basic research, we’re going to build our universities’ capacity to do it, we have an unparalleled basic research capacity, and we should always have that,” said Prabhakar.“We have gotten better, I think, in recent years at commercializing technology from our basic research,” Prabhakar added, noting, “Capital moves when you can see profit and growth.” The Biden administration, she said, has invested in a variety of new ways for the public and private sector to work together to massively accelerate the movement of technology into the market.Wednesday’s talk drew a capacity audience of nearly 300 people in MIT’s Wong Auditorium and was hosted by the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group. The event included introductory remarks by Suzanne Berger, an Institute Professor and a longtime expert on the innovation economy, and Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the School of Science and an astrophysicist and leader in gravitational-wave detection.Introducing Mavalvala, Berger said the 2015 announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves “was the day I felt proudest and most elated to be a member of the MIT community,” and noted that U.S. government support helped make the research possible. Mavalvala, in turn, said MIT was “especially honored” to hear Prabhakar discuss leading-edge research and acknowledge the role of universities in strengthening the country’s science and technology sectors.Prabhakar has extensive experience in both government and the private sector. She has been OSTP director and co-chair of PCAST since October of 2022. She served as director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 2012 to 2017 and director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 1993 to 1997.She has also held executive positions at Raychem and Interval Research, and spent a decade at the investment firm U.S. Venture Partners. An engineer by training, Prabhakar earned a BS in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University in 1979, an MA in electrical engineering from Caltech in 1980, and a PhD in applied physics from Caltech in 1984.Among other remarks about medicine, Prabhakar touted the Biden administration’s “Cancer Moonshot” program, which aims to cut the cancer death rate in half over the next 25 years through multiple approaches, from better health care provision and cancer detection to limiting public exposure to carcinogens. We should be striving, Prabhakar said, for “a future in which people take good health for granted and can get on with their lives.”On AI, she heralded both the promise and concerns about technology, saying, “I think it’s time for active steps to get on a path to where it actually allows people to do more and earn more.”When it comes to climate change, Prabhakar said, “We all understand that the climate is going to change. But it’s in our hands how severe those changes get. And it’s possible that we can build a better future.” She noted the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law in 2021 and the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act as important steps forward in this fight.“Together those are making the single biggest investment anyone anywhere on the planet has ever made in the clean energy transition,” she said. “I used to feel hopeless about our ability to do that, and it gives me tremendous hope.”After her talk, Prabhakar was joined onstage for a group discussion with the three co-presidents of the MIT Energy and Climate Club: Laurentiu Anton, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and computer science; Rosie Keller, an MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management; and Thomas Lee, a doctoral candidate in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.Asked about the seemingly sagging public confidence in science today, Prabhakar offered a few thoughts.“The first thing I would say is, don’t take it personally,” Prabhakar said, noting that any dip in public regard for science is less severe than the diminished public confidence in other institutions.Adding some levity, she observed that in polling about which occupations are regarded as being desirable for a marriage partner to have, “scientist” still ranks highly.“Scientists still do really well on that front, we’ve got that going for us,” she quipped.More seriously, Prabhakar observed, rather than “preaching” at the public, scientists should recognize that “part of the job for us is to continue to be clear about what we know are the facts, and to present them clearly but humbly, and to be clear that we’re going to continue working to learn more.” At the same time, she continued, scientists can always reinforce that “oh, by the way, facts are helpful things that can actually help you make better choices about how the future turns out. I think that would be better in my view.”Prabhakar said that her White House work had been guided, in part, by one of the overarching themes that President Biden has often reinforced.“He thinks about America as a nation that can be described in a single word, and that word is ‘possibilities,’” she said. “And that idea, that is such a big idea, it lights me up. I think of what we do in the world of science and technology and innovation as really part and parcel of creating those possibilities.”Ultimately, Prabhakar said, at all times and all points in American history, scientists and technologists must continue “to prove once more that when people come together and do this work … we do it in a way that builds opportunity and expands opportunity for everyone in our country. I think this is the great privilege we all have in the work we do, and it’s also our responsibility.” More

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      in Energy

      A nonflammable battery to power a safer, decarbonized future

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      Lithium-ion batteries are the workhorses of home electronics and are powering an electric revolution in transportation. But they are not suitable for every application.A key drawback is their flammability and toxicity, which make large-scale lithium-ion energy storage a bad fit in densely populated city centers and near metal processing or chemical manufacturing plants.Now Alsym Energy has developed a nonflammable, nontoxic alternative to lithium-ion batteries to help renewables like wind and solar bridge the gap in a broader range of sectors. The company’s electrodes use relatively stable, abundant materials, and its electrolyte is primarily water with some nontoxic add-ons.“Renewables are intermittent, so you need storage, and to really solve the decarbonization problem, we need to be able to make these batteries anywhere at low cost,” says Alsym co-founder and MIT Professor Kripa Varanasi.The company believes its batteries, which are currently being tested by potential customers around the world, hold enormous potential to decarbonize the high-emissions industrial manufacturing sector, and they see other applications ranging from mining to powering data centers, homes, and utilities.“We are enabling a decarbonization of markets that was not possible before,” Alsym co-founder and CEO Mukesh Chatter says. “No chemical or steel plant would dare put a lithium battery close to their premises because of the flammability, and industrial emissions are a much bigger problem than passenger cars. With this approach, we’re able to offer a new path.”Helping 1 billion peopleChatter started a telecommunications company with serial entrepreneurs and longtime members of the MIT community Ray Stata ’57, SM ’58 and Alec Dingee ’52 in 1997. Since the company was acquired in 1999, Chatter and his wife have started other ventures and invested in some startups, but after losing his mother to cancer in 2012, Chatter decided he wanted to maximize his impact by only working on technologies that could reach 1 billion people or more.The problem Chatter decided to focus on was electricity access.“The intent was to light up the homes of at least 1 billion people around the world who either did not have electricity, or only got it part of the time, condemning them basically to a life of poverty in the 19th century,” Chatter says. “When you don’t have access to electricity, you also don’t have the internet, cell phones, education, etc.”To solve the problem, Chatter decided to fund research into a new kind of battery. The battery had to be cheap enough to be adopted in low-resource settings, safe enough to be deployed in crowded areas, and work well enough to support two light bulbs, a fan, a refrigerator, and an internet modem.At first, Chatter was surprised how few takers he had to start the research, even from researchers at the top universities in the world.“It’s a burning problem, but the risk of failure was so high that nobody wanted to take the chance,” Chatter recalls.He finally found his partners in Varanasi, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Nikhil Koratkar and Rensselaer researcher Rahul Mukherjee. Varanasi, who notes he’s been at MIT for 22 years, says the Institute’s culture gave him the confidence to tackle big problems.“My students, postdocs, and colleagues are inspirational to me,” he says. “The MIT ecosystem infuses us with this resolve to go after problems that look insurmountable.”Varanasi leads an interdisciplinary lab at MIT dedicated to understanding physicochemical and biological phenomena. His research has spurred the creation of materials, devices, products, and processes to tackle challenges in energy, agriculture, and other sectors, as well as startup companies to commercialize this work.“Working at the interfaces of matter has unlocked numerous new research pathways across various fields, and MIT has provided me the creative freedom to explore, discover, and learn, and apply that knowledge to solve critical challenges,” he says. “I was able to draw significantly from my learnings as we set out to develop the new battery technology.”Alsym’s founding team began by trying to design a battery from scratch based on new materials that could fit the parameters defined by Chatter. To make it nonflammable and nontoxic, the founders wanted to avoid lithium and cobalt.After evaluating many different chemistries, the founders settled on Alsym’s current approach, which was finalized in 2020.Although the full makeup of Alsym’s battery is still under wraps as the company waits to be granted patents, one of Alsym’s electrodes is made mostly of manganese oxide while the other is primarily made of a metal oxide. The electrolyte is primarily water.There are several advantages to Alsym’s new battery chemistry. Because the battery is inherently safer and more sustainable than lithium-ion, the company doesn’t need the same safety protections or cooling equipment, and it can pack its batteries close to each other without fear of fires or explosions. Varanasi also says the battery can be manufactured in any of today’s lithium-ion plants with minimal changes and at significantly lower operating cost.“We are very excited right now,” Chatter says. “We started out wanting to light up 1 billion people’s homes, and now in addition to the original goal we have a chance to impact the entire globe if we are successful at cutting back industrial emissions.”A new platform for energy storageAlthough the batteries don’t quite reach the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, Varanasi says Alsym is first among alternative chemistries at the system-level. He says 20-foot containers of Alsym’s batteries can provide 1.7 megawatt hours of electricity. The batteries can also fast-charge over four hours and can be configured to discharge over anywhere from two to 110 hours.“We’re highly configurable, and that’s important because depending on where you are, you can sometimes run on two cycles a day with solar, and in combination with wind, you could truly get 24/7 electricity,” Chatter says. “The need to do multiday or long duration storage is a small part of the market, but we support that too.”Alsym has been manufacturing prototypes at a small facility in Woburn, Massachusetts, for the last two years, and early this year it expanded its capacity and began to send samples to customers for field testing.In addition to large utilities, the company is working with municipalities, generator manufacturers, and providers of behind-the-meter power for residential and commercial buildings. The company is also in discussion with a large chemical manufacturers and metal processing plants to provide energy storage system to reduce their carbon footprint, something they say was not feasible with lithium-ion batteries, due to their flammability, or with nonlithium batteries, due to their large space requirements.Another critical area is data centers. With the growth of AI, the demand for data centers — and their energy consumption — is set to surge.“We must power the AI and digitization revolution without compromising our planet,” says Varanasi, adding that lithium batteries are unsuitable for co-location with data centers due to flammability risks. “Alsym batteries are well-positioned to offer a safer, more sustainable alternative. Intermittency is also a key issue for electrolyzers used in green hydrogen production and other markets.”Varanasi sees Alsym as a platform company, and Chatter says Alsym is already working on other battery chemistries that have higher densities and maintain performance at even more extreme temperatures.“When you use a single material in any battery, and the whole world starts to use it, you run out of that material,” Varanasi says. “What we have is a platform that has enabled us to not just to come up with just one chemistry, but at least three or four chemistries targeted at different applications so no one particular set of materials will be stressed in terms of supply.” More

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      in Environment

      MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical

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      As the world struggles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, researchers are seeking practical, economical ways to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into useful products, such as transportation fuels, chemical feedstocks, or even building materials. But so far, such attempts have struggled to reach economic viability.New research by engineers at MIT could lead to rapid improvements in a variety of electrochemical systems that are under development to convert carbon dioxide into a valuable commodity. The team developed a new design for the electrodes used in these systems, which increases the efficiency of the conversion process.The findings are reported today in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by MIT doctoral student Simon Rufer, professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi, and three others.“The CO2 problem is a big challenge for our times, and we are using all kinds of levers to solve and address this problem,” Varanasi says. It will be essential to find practical ways of removing the gas, he says, either from sources such as power plant emissions, or straight out of the air or the oceans. But then, once the CO2 has been removed, it has to go somewhere.A wide variety of systems have been developed for converting that captured gas into a useful chemical product, Varanasi says. “It’s not that we can’t do it — we can do it. But the question is how can we make this efficient? How can we make this cost-effective?”In the new study, the team focused on the electrochemical conversion of CO2 to ethylene, a widely used chemical that can be made into a variety of plastics as well as fuels, and which today is made from petroleum. But the approach they developed could also be applied to producing other high-value chemical products as well, including methane, methanol, carbon monoxide, and others, the researchers say.Currently, ethylene sells for about $1,000 per ton, so the goal is to be able to meet or beat that price. The electrochemical process that converts CO2 into ethylene involves a water-based solution and a catalyst material, which come into contact along with an electric current in a device called a gas diffusion electrode.There are two competing characteristics of the gas diffusion electrode materials that affect their performance: They must be good electrical conductors so that the current that drives the process doesn’t get wasted through resistance heating, but they must also be “hydrophobic,” or water repelling, so the water-based electrolyte solution doesn’t leak through and interfere with the reactions taking place at the electrode surface.Unfortunately, it’s a tradeoff. Improving the conductivity reduces the hydrophobicity, and vice versa. Varanasi and his team set out to see if they could find a way around that conflict, and after many months of trying, they did just that.The solution, devised by Rufer and Varanasi, is elegant in its simplicity. They used a plastic material, PTFE (essentially Teflon), that has been known to have good hydrophobic properties. However, PTFE’s lack of conductivity means that electrons must travel through a very thin catalyst layer, leading to significant voltage drop with distance. To overcome this limitation, the researchers wove a series of conductive copper wires through the very thin sheet of the PTFE.“This work really addressed this challenge, as we can now get both conductivity and hydrophobicity,” Varanasi says.Research on potential carbon conversion systems tends to be done on very small, lab-scale samples, typically less than 1-inch (2.5-centimeter) squares. To demonstrate the potential for scaling up, Varanasi’s team produced a sheet 10 times larger in area and demonstrated its effective performance.To get to that point, they had to do some basic tests that had apparently never been done before, running tests under identical conditions but using electrodes of different sizes to analyze the relationship between conductivity and electrode size. They found that conductivity dropped off dramatically with size, which would mean much more energy, and thus cost, would be needed to drive the reaction.“That’s exactly what we would expect, but it was something that nobody had really dedicatedly investigated before,” Rufer says. In addition, the larger sizes produced more unwanted chemical byproducts besides the intended ethylene.Real-world industrial applications would require electrodes that are perhaps 100 times larger than the lab versions, so adding the conductive wires will be necessary for making such systems practical, the researchers say. They also developed a model which captures the spatial variability in voltage and product distribution on electrodes due to ohmic losses. The model along with the experimental data they collected enabled them to calculate the optimal spacing for conductive wires to counteract the drop off in conductivity.In effect, by weaving the wire through the material, the material is divided into smaller subsections determined by the spacing of the wires. “We split it into a bunch of little subsegments, each of which is effectively a smaller electrode,” Rufer says. “And as we’ve seen, small electrodes can work really well.”Because the copper wire is so much more conductive than the PTFE material, it acts as a kind of superhighway for electrons passing through, bridging the areas where they are confined to the substrate and face greater resistance.To demonstrate that their system is robust, the researchers ran a test electrode for 75 hours continuously, with little change in performance. Overall, Rufer says, their system “is the first PTFE-based electrode which has gone beyond the lab scale on the order of 5 centimeters or smaller. It’s the first work that has progressed into a much larger scale and has done so without sacrificing efficiency.”The weaving process for incorporating the wire can be easily integrated into existing manufacturing processes, even in a large-scale roll-to-roll process, he adds.“Our approach is very powerful because it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual catalyst being used,” Rufer says. “You can sew this micrometric copper wire into any gas diffusion electrode you want, independent of catalyst morphology or chemistry. So, this approach can be used to scale anybody’s electrode.”“Given that we will need to process gigatons of CO2 annually to combat the CO2 challenge, we really need to think about solutions that can scale,” Varanasi says. “Starting with this mindset enables us to identify critical bottlenecks and develop innovative approaches that can make a meaningful impact in solving the problem. Our hierarchically conductive electrode is a result of such thinking.”The research team included MIT graduate students Michael Nitzsche and Sanjay Garimella,  as well as Jack Lake PhD ’23. The work was supported by Shell, through the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      in Environment

      Bubble findings could unlock better electrode and electrolyzer designs

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      Industrial electrochemical processes that use electrodes to produce fuels and chemical products are hampered by the formation of bubbles that block parts of the electrode surface, reducing the area available for the active reaction. Such blockage reduces the performance of the electrodes by anywhere from 10 to 25 percent.But new research reveals a decades-long misunderstanding about the extent of that interference. The findings show exactly how the blocking effect works and could lead to new ways of designing electrode surfaces to minimize inefficiencies in these widely used electrochemical processes.It has long been assumed that the entire area of the electrode shadowed by each bubble would be effectively inactivated. But it turns out that a much smaller area — roughly the area where the bubble actually contacts the surface — is blocked from its electrochemical activity. The new insights could lead directly to new ways of patterning the surfaces to minimize the contact area and improve overall efficiency.The findings are reported today in the journal Nanoscale, in a paper by recent MIT graduate Jack Lake PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi, research scientist Ben Blaiszik, and six others at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. The team has made available an open-source, AI-based software tool that engineers and scientists can now use to automatically recognize and quantify bubbles formed on a given surface, as a first step toward controlling the electrode material’s properties.

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      Gas-evolving electrodes, often with catalytic surfaces that promote chemical reactions, are used in a wide variety of processes, including the production of “green” hydrogen without the use of fossil fuels, carbon-capture processes that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, aluminum production, and the chlor-alkali process that is used to make widely used chemical products.These are very widespread processes. The chlor-alkali process alone accounts for 2 percent of all U.S. electricity usage; aluminum production accounts for 3 percent of global electricity; and both carbon capture and hydrogen production are likely to grow rapidly in coming years as the world strives to meet greenhouse-gas reduction targets. So, the new findings could make a real difference, Varanasi says.“Our work demonstrates that engineering the contact and growth of bubbles on electrodes can have dramatic effects” on how bubbles form and how they leave the surface, he says. “The knowledge that the area under bubbles can be significantly active ushers in a new set of design rules for high-performance electrodes to avoid the deleterious effects of bubbles.”“The broader literature built over the last couple of decades has suggested that not only that small area of contact but the entire area under the bubble is passivated,” Rufer says. The new study reveals “a significant difference between the two models because it changes how you would develop and design an electrode to minimize these losses.”To test and demonstrate the implications of this effect, the team produced different versions of electrode surfaces with patterns of dots that nucleated and trapped bubbles at different sizes and spacings. They were able to show that surfaces with widely spaced dots promoted large bubble sizes but only tiny areas of surface contact, which helped to make clear the difference between the expected and actual effects of bubble coverage.Developing the software to detect and quantify bubble formation was necessary for the team’s analysis, Rufer explains. “We wanted to collect a lot of data and look at a lot of different electrodes and different reactions and different bubbles, and they all look slightly different,” he says. Creating a program that could deal with different materials and different lighting and reliably identify and track the bubbles was a tricky process, and machine learning was key to making it work, he says.Using that tool, he says, they were able to collect “really significant amounts of data about the bubbles on a surface, where they are, how big they are, how fast they’re growing, all these different things.” The tool is now freely available for anyone to use via the GitHub repository.By using that tool to correlate the visual measures of bubble formation and evolution with electrical measurements of the electrode’s performance, the researchers were able to disprove the accepted theory and to show that only the area of direct contact is affected. Videos further proved the point, revealing new bubbles actively evolving directly under parts of a larger bubble.The researchers developed a very general methodology that can be applied to characterize and understand the impact of bubbles on any electrode or catalyst surface. They were able to quantify the bubble passivation effects in a new performance metric they call BECSA (Bubble-induced electrochemically active surface), as opposed to ECSA (electrochemically active surface area), that is used in the field. “The BECSA metric was a concept we defined in an earlier study but did not have an effective method to estimate until this work,” says Varanasi.The knowledge that the area under bubbles can be significantly active ushers in a new set of design rules for high-performance electrodes. This means that electrode designers should seek to minimize bubble contact area rather than simply bubble coverage, which can be achieved by controlling the morphology and chemistry of the electrodes. Surfaces engineered to control bubbles can not only improve the overall efficiency of the processes and thus reduce energy use, they can also save on upfront materials costs. Many of these gas-evolving electrodes are coated with catalysts made of expensive metals like platinum or iridium, and the findings from this work can be used to engineer electrodes to reduce material wasted by reaction-blocking bubbles.Varanasi says that “the insights from this work could inspire new electrode architectures that not only reduce the usage of precious materials, but also improve the overall electrolyzer performance,” both of which would provide large-scale environmental benefits.The research team included Jim James, Nathan Pruyne, Aristana Scourtas, Marcus Schwarting, Aadit Ambalkar, Ian Foster, and Ben Blaiszik at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under the ARPA-E program. More

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      in Environment

      Making steel with electricity

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      Steel is one of the most useful materials on the planet. A backbone of modern life, it’s used in skyscrapers, cars, airplanes, bridges, and more. Unfortunately, steelmaking is an extremely dirty process.The most common way it’s produced involves mining iron ore, reducing it in a blast furnace through the addition of coal, and then using an oxygen furnace to burn off excess carbon and other impurities. That’s why steel production accounts for around 7 to 9 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, making it one of the dirtiest industries on the planet.Now Boston Metal is seeking to clean up the steelmaking industry using an electrochemical process called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE), which eliminates many steps in steelmaking and releases oxygen as its sole byproduct.The company, which was founded by MIT Professor Emeritus Donald Sadoway, Professor Antoine Allanore, and James Yurko PhD ’01, is already using MOE to recover high-value metals from mining waste at its Brazilian subsidiary, Boston Metal do Brasil. That work is helping Boston Metal’s team deploy its technology at commercial scale and establish key partnerships with mining operators. It has also built a prototype MOE reactor to produce green steel at its headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts.And despite its name, Boston Metal has global ambitions. The company has raised more than $370 million to date from organizations across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East, and its leaders expect to scale up rapidly to transform steel production in every corner of the world.“There’s a worldwide recognition that we need to act rapidly, and that’s going to happen through technology solutions like this that can help us move away from incumbent technologies,” Boston Metal Chief Scientist and former MIT postdoc Guillaume Lambotte says. “More and more, climate change is a part of our lives, so the pressure is on everyone to act fast.”To the moon and backThe origins of Boston Metal’s technology start on the moon. In the mid 2000s, Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Materials Science, received a grant from NASA to explore ways to produce oxygen for future lunar bases. Sadoway and other MIT researchers explored the idea of sending an electric current through the iron oxide rock on the moon’s surface, using rock from an old asteroid in Arizona for their experiments. The reaction produced oxygen, with metal as a byproduct.The research stuck with Sadoway, who noticed that down here on Earth, that metal byproduct would be of interest. To help make the electrolysis reaction he studied more viable, he joined forces with Allanore, who is a professor of metallurgy at MIT and the Lechtman Chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The professors were able to identify a less expensive anode and partnered with Yurko, a former student, to found Boston Metal.“All of the fundamental studies and the initial technologies came out of MIT,” Lambotte says. “We spun out of research that was patented at MIT and licensed from MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.”Lambotte joined the company shortly after Boston Metal’s team published a 2013 paper in Nature describing the MOE platform.“That’s when it went from the lab, with a coffee cup-sized experiment to prove the fundamentals and produce a few grams, to a company that can produce hundreds of kilograms, and soon, tons of metal,” Lambotte says.

      Boston Metal’s process takes place in modular MOE cells the size of a school bus. Here is a schematic of the process.

      Boston Metal’s molten oxide electrolysis process takes place in modular MOE cells the size of a school bus. Iron ore rock is fed into the cell, which contains the cathode (the negative terminal of the MOE cell) and an anode immersed in a liquid electrolyte. The anode is inert, meaning it doesn’t dissolve in the electrolyte or take part in the reaction other than serving as the positive terminal. When electricity runs between the anode and cathode and the cell reaches around 1,600 degrees Celsius, the iron oxide bonds in the ore are split, producing pure liquid metal at the bottom that can be tapped. The byproduct of the reaction is oxygen, and the process doesn’t require water, hazardous chemicals, or precious-metal catalysts.The production of each cell depends on the size of its current. Lambotte says with about 600,000 amps, each cell could produce up to 10 tons of metal every day. Steelmakers would license Boston Metal’s technology and deploy as many cells as needed to reach their production targets.Boston Metal is already using MOE to help mining companies recover high-value metals from their mining waste, which usually needs to undergo costly treatment or storage. Lambotte says it could also be used to produce many other kinds of metals down the line, and Boston Metal was recently selected to negotiate grant funding to produce chromium metal — critical for a number of clean energy applications — in West Virginia.“If you look around the world, a lot of the feedstocks for metal are oxides, and if it’s an oxide, then there’s a chance we can work with that feedstock,” Lambotte says. “There’s a lot of excitement because everyone needs a solution capable of decarbonizing the metal industry, so a lot of people are interested to understand where MOE fits in their own processes.”Gigatons of potentialBoston Metal’s steel decarbonization technology is currently slated to reach commercial-scale in 2026, though its Brazil plant is already introducing the industry to MOE.“I think it’s a window for the metal industry to get acquainted with MOE and see how it works,” Lambotte says. “You need people in the industry to grasp this technology. It’s where you form connections and how new technology spreads.”The Brazilian plant runs on 100 percent renewable energy.“We can be the beneficiary of this tremendous worldwide push to decarbonize the energy sector,” Lambotte says. “I think our approach goes hand in hand with that. Fully green steel requires green electricity, and I think what you’ll see is deployment of this technology where [clean electricity] is already readily available.”Boston Metal’s team is excited about MOE’s application across the metals industry but is focused first and foremost on eliminating the gigatons of emissions from steel production.“Steel produces around 10 percent of global emissions, so that is our north star,” Lambotte says. “Everyone is pledging carbon reductions, emissions reductions, and making net zero goals, so the steel industry is really looking hard for viable technology solutions. People are ready for new approaches.” More

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      in Energy

      Seizing solar’s bright future

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      Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.Beyond siliconSilicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”Measuring makes the differenceWith Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”Photovoltaics is just the startThe company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO2 [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.” More