I-Corps: Technology Transfer for Commercialization of Industrial, Electronic and Medical Device Products Based on a Patented Ultrananocrystalline Diamond Coating

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Product reliability is one of the main issues that any company worries about and offers to the customers. For example, chemical attack of metal-based anodes and cathodes by the harsh Li-ion battery environment shortens substantially the battery lifetime and strongly reduces it performance. Current metallic prostheses, such as hips and knees, implanted in humans, exhibit corrosion by body fluids, resulting in pain and need for early replacement. This I-CORPS team focuses on identifying and developing the commercialization pathway for novel patented ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD) films as coatings for critical components of industrial, electronic, and medical devices/systems exposed to harsh chemically and mechanical environments, improving their lifetime and performance by at least one order of magnitude. The focus of the proposed effort will be to explore the insertion into the market of a new generation of Li-ion batteries (LIBs) with UNCD-coated anodes, cathodes, membranes, and inner walls case, to produce LIBs with ¡Ý 10x longer life and smaller dimensions than for current LIBs, due to the protective action of the UNCD coatings on all battery components from corrosion. The technology will be demonstrated for coin-type cell phone small batteries. The other application of UNCD coatings will be for medical devices and implants, for which preliminary work done by this team group has demonstrated that UNCD coatings can enable a new generation of medical implants with order of magnitude longer life and superior performance than current uncoated metal implants (e.g., hips, knees, dental implants, which are failing due to chemical attach by body fluids), which are failing due to chemical attack by body fluids.The patented UNCD coatings will be grown using microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition (MPCVD) and hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) techniques, available to the team, to determine which provides the best coating properties for the specific application. The research work over the last 20 years has demonstrated that the UNCD films exhibit unique nanostructures with 3 to 5 nm grain sizes, and a unique combination of properties, namely: 1) highest hardness and resistance to wear (similar to single crystal diamond) compared to any other known coating, 2) extremely smooth surface (rms roughness of ~ 3-5 nm), 3) lowest friction coefficient compared to any other coatings, 4) extremely low stress, 5) tunability of surface wettability from highly hydrophobic (no water adhesion to the surface) to highly hydrophilic (high water adhesion), 6) extremely resistant to chemical attack by any strong acid and human body fluids (critical for applications as coating for medical implants), 7) electrically conductive when doped with boron atoms in the diamond lattice or nitrogen atoms in the grain boundaries, 8) electrically insulating when grown without B or N incorporation, 9) B-doped UNCD exhibits the widest electrochemical potential compared with other electrode materials, 10) UNCD films exhibit one of the lowest threshold voltages for electron emission, 11) UNCD films can be processed by lithography and etching processes used for fabrication of silicon based MEMS/NEMS devices, to produce a new generation of these devices far superior than silicon based counterparts, and 12) UNCD is extremely biocompatible. The UNCD properties mentioned above enable multi-functionalities for a wide range of technological applications as described above, which can make a substantial impact in several high-tech markets. The MPCVD technique will be implanted in an industrial-type system capable of growing UNCD films on up to 200 mm diameter substrates to demonstrate immediate transfer of the UNCD growth process into an industrial compatible process. The HFCVD technique will be implemented in a system capable of growing UNCD films on up to 100 mm diameter substrates.