PFI-BIC: Market-Guided Ionic Liquid Discovery and Design

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This Partnership for Innovation project from the University of Notre Dame will discover, design, and translate ionic liquids (ILs) into new products and processes that are innovative and might eventually be ready to be marketed. Three target markets will be pursued: 1) development of processes to efficiently turn 'waste' heat into useful electricity; 2) finding new environmentally benign ways to deposit hard metal coatings on metal surfaces; and 3) developing improved 'ultracapacitors' (devices that store electrical energy and can be charged and discharged rapidly over millions of times). Each application will utilize an IL, defined as a pure salt that is liquid around room temperature. ILs are relatively newly discovered compounds that have many unique properties not found in conventional liquids, such as virtually no vapor pressure, inherent electrical conductivity, high thermal stability, and large electrochemical windows. These properties will be exploited in this project to develop new products and processes that address large market needs. The broader impacts of this research are that it will address issues across multiple cross-sections of society that are of critical importance to the U.S. and world economy. It will provide hands-on technology design and implementation opportunities in the area of ionic liquids. In the long term, there will be opportunities to optimize candidate ionic liquids for several production-scale applications while at the same time reducing volume manufacturing costs. The project will allow two small, Innovation Park Notre Dame-based businesses to help South Bend, Indiana, a traditional Midwestern manufacturing city, re-invent itself. Partners at the inception of this project are the University of Notre Dame (lead institution, Notre Dame, IN). Small businesses: Echogen Power Systems Inc. (Akron, OH); Ionic Research Technologies LLC (South Bend, IN); Neo Industries LLC (Portage, IN). Large businesses: Maxwell Technologies, Inc. (San Diego, CA); and United Technologies Research Center (East Hartford, CT). Additional partner organizations that are not part of the KEP groups are the Notre Dame ESTEEM professional science and engineering master's program, Innovation Park Notre Dame, Michiana TechConnection, and the Notre Dame Master of Science in Patent Law program.