A key challenge, in the quest to translate new discoveries on the nanometre-scale into innovative products and processes, is scale-up. A discovery may be made in experiments on individual nanoparticles, but the industrial application may require kilograms of material, while preserving the nanoscale architecture which gave rise to the performance. The Lab’s approach is based on a new invention, the Matrix Assembly Cluster Source (MACS), which scales-up the rate of nanocluster production by at least 5 orders of magnitude, with the potential to achieve a factor 10⁸; thus from the 100ng level of a conventional cluster beam deposition source to 10g of clusters per hour. Just as important as scale-up is the materials efficiency, especially if you are using precious metals like Pt. The MACS offers close to 0% loss. Possible applications of precise nanoparticles manufactured at the gram scale include biomedical diagnostics, drug delivery, antimicrobials, photonics, energy storage, catalysts, fuel cells, electrolysers for green hydrogen generation and water purification in developing countries.

Morris with the MACS