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HighT-Tech Inc. seeks to do business in a broad range of technologies areas through partnership.
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Materials Discovery Through Rapid Sintering
The fast-sintering rate of UHS also enables the co-sintering of multiple materials simultaneously, which permits even faster screening of materials or devices. In practical ceramic synthesis, sintering can be the most time-consuming process, especially when the sintering parameters have not yet been optimized for new compositions.
With our sintering technique, 100 ceramic pellets can be rapidly co-sintered using a 20 by 5 matrix setup (for a pellet size of 5 mm). Coupling both computation and high-throughput materials discovery will eliminate the current bottleneck in the discovery and development of important materials for environmentally friendly and sustainable clean energy applications.
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Solid Oxide Electrolyzers to Generate Green Hydrogen
Solid oxide electrolysis cell (SOEC) consists of an anode, a cathode and an electrolyte. The electrolyte is a solid ceramic material and the anode and cathode that coat the electrolyte and facilitate an electrochemical pathway to produce hydrogen from water using renewable electricity.
Fabrication of SOEC requires heat treatments to densify the structure and form good interfaces to transport oxygen ions. The heat treatment process comprises ~40% of the total manufacturing costs of Solid Oxide Electrolyzer stacks, which require expensive equipment, use significant energy, and are the longest step in the manufacturing process of SOECs (hours to days). Advanced sintering approaches that reduce the number of firing steps and shorten the overall time will aid in scaling up the production at a low cost.
HighT-Tech's UHS-SOEC process will reduce sintering steps, shorten sintering time to minutes, and enable continuous sintering of multilayers together with excellent physical interfaces, without creating high interlayer resistance.
Coating in Harsh Environments (ARPA-E Project)
Coating technologies play a more and more important role for meeting the service requirements in harsh environments. For example, gas turbine applications in the power generation and aviation industries require ultra-high temperature conditions of 1300 °C (2372 °F). New ultrahigh-temperature materials and coatings for gas turbines will enable them to operate continuously in an even higher temperature of 1800 °C (3272 °F). The materials must withstand not only the highest temperature in a turbine but also the extreme stresses imposed on turbine blades.
The UHS process is ideal for optimizing advanced coatings for direct deposition onto substrates.
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The process breaks through the bottlenecks preventing the rapid evaluation of multi-layer coatings for advanced environmental and thermal protection.
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The process allows us to quickly identify, design, and optimize 1700 °C-capable coatings.
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The ultrafast process can be used to identify materials and manufacture coatings for future Hydrogen turbines.
Funded by ARPA-E, HighT-Tech through collaborations with Prof. JC Zhao (PI, UMD)), Prof. Liangbing Hu (Co-PI, UMD) and Prof. David Clarke (Co-PI, Harvard) developed dense, crack-free, and delamination-free coatings using the UHS method. We have produced next-generation thermal barrier coatings, such as YSZ and Yb2SiO5. The advantages include
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Fast processing
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Multilayer deposition
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Low capital cost
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Low energy consumption
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High scalability
Advanced coatings represent a diverse material set for broad applications in extreme conditions where specialized and advanced coatings play an important role.
We are looking for partners to co-develop this technology!
Other Extreme Materials
Super hard coating such as high-entropy borides (HEB)/boron carbide
Ultrahigh-temperature refractory metals
Refractor metal
Credit to Science Advances 2022, Hu group
Pipeline Repair (ARPA-E Project)
Natural gas provides 31% of US primary energy. Pipeline infrastructure repair/rehabilitation spending exceeds $3B/year across all sectors. Cast iron, wrought iron, and bare steel natural gas distribution pipes — legacy pipes — make up 3% of the nearly 2 million miles of utility pipes in use, but account for a disproportionate number of gas leaks and pipe failures.
Gas leaks have the potential to cause serious injuries and even fatalities in many cases. Gas pipeline leaks include the release of Methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas with a 100-year
global warming potential that is between 28- and 34- times higher than that of carbon dioxide. Leaking pipelines cause billions of dollars of lost revenue annually, in terms of both direct product loss and the cost and time required to replace
them. Novel rehabilitation technologies enable the automated construction of new pipe inside the existing pipe to address these issues.
Dense microstructure of the sintered metal material with no stress-induced cracking and minimal pores. Functionally gradient microstructure with a higher fraction of carbides near the surface for high hardness.
The method can flexibly incorporate smart features in the designs of the materials (e.g., smart steel with shape memory
alloy) and coat old pipe surfaces with changing geometries. Our approach can be extended to fixing other metal materials such as the steam pipes and future hydrogen pipeline.
Optical Materials
The sintered glasses exhibit relative densities of > 98% and high visible transmittances of ~90%. The powder-based UHS sintering process also allows doping of metal ions to fabricate colored glasses
We extended the UHS process to sinter other functional glasses such as indium tin oxide (ITO)-doped silica glass, and other transparent ceramics such as Gd-doped yttrium aluminum garnet.
Credit to Small 2022, Hu group
3D Additive Manufacturing
Through a 3D heating head design, the UHS process can be used to mix multi-elemental metal powders in less than a second. This UHS-based melt printing process provides excellent potential toward 3D printing of metals and ceramics.
