For the fourth year in a row, a Vanderbilt technology is taking home one of the prestigious R&D100 awards for 2020. The winning technology comes from the Vanderbilt startup SkyNano who won the award for their innovative process that overcomes the high cost and scalability limitations of traditional carbon nanotube manufacturing techniques while simultaneously repurposing harmful greenhouse gases into useful, functional nanomaterials.
Their technology, licensed from Vanderbilt University, generates high value carbon nanotubes while using only carbon dioxide, inexpensive materials, and electricity. Traditional manufacturing techniques used to create advanced carbon additives require high vacuum and high pressure gas flow systems, which are both expensive and suffer from a lack of scalability - this accounts for the high price of advanced carbon structures. SkyNano, however, is developing a low cost manufacturing technique to create these carbon additives by using inexpensive materials, electricity and carbon dioxide as direct inputs. The technique is based on a process developed by Dr. Cary Pint’s laboratory and makes use of high-value secondary material produced from greenhouse gases and relies on electrochemistry, rather than environmentally unfriendly catalysis. The result is a highly efficient process that converts atmospheric carbon dioxide into useful functional nanomaterials.
Currently, SkyNano is run by Anna Douglas, Cary Pint, and Anna Klug.
The R&D 100 Awards honor 100 top innovations of the prior year, as selected by a panel of expert judges, and is in its 57th year. The Center for Technology Transfer and Commercialization (CTTC) leads the submission on behalf of Vanderbilt University, which has now won a R&D 100 Award four years in a row.