Anti-Corrosion Coatings

Financial damage to the transportation, marine, construction, machinery, and consumer appliance industries caused by corrosion is measured in the tens of billions of dollars each year. Risks associated with metal corrosion range from simple aesthetics problems to serious structural instability.

SRI's platform technology for silicon-based polymers offers coatings products with a wide array of applications including protection of metal surfaces from corrosion. These coatings—available for license—dramatically enhance the durability, safety, and sustainability of metal structures.

Products being commercialized based on SRI's anti-corrosion coating technology have been tested with salt-spray, hot acid, and hot/ cold temperature cycling.

Applications include automotive components, industrial machinery and pipes, and a variety of metal structures such as port cranes and support elements in buildings and bridges.

For more information on SRI's anti-corrosion coatings download the PDF.

Contact: Alex Beavers, Commercial Ventures and Strategic Programs, alex.beavers@sri.com

Anti-Smudge Surface Coatings

Touchscreen handhelds and a wide variety of other glass and metal surfaces tend to become easily opaque and smudged, causing early disposal of consumer electronics and appliances, or requiring frequent use of cleaning fluids.

SRI's anti-smudge technology can extend the lifetime of glass or metal products by 10 to 15 percent by protecting them with SRI's coatings. These coatings diminish the deposition of smudges and allow for fast, easy cleaning.

Benefits include intact glass transparency, easy fingerprint removal, production scalability with conventional equipment, and low per-unit cost.

For more information on SRI's anti-smudge surface coatings download the PDF.

Contact: Alex Beavers, Commercial Ventures and Strategic Programs, alex.beavers@sri.com

Blast Protection Technology for Windows

During recent conflicts, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in the use of improvised explosive devices as methods of warfare and terrorism. As a result, more government and commercial buildings require hardened windows for added security. SRI's unique blast protection technology for glass windows is available for licensing. The patented life-saving technology is retrofit to existing windows to prevent shattered glass from flying into a building if an explosion occurs outside. With an increased need for protection, SRI’s "soft catch" system can retrofit existing windows to withstand blast loads.

SRI's approach meets the performance criteria for 10 pounds per square inch blast pressure specified by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) for hardening windows to higher threat levels. The SRI technology uses a film attached to the inside of a window that captures the glass fragments.  The technology uniquely connects the film and window frame, allowing the film to displace significantly while softly absorbing the energy of the glass. The system can be easily installed onto existing windows.

Contact: Alex Beavers, Commercial Ventures and Strategic Programs, alex.beavers@sri.com

High-Sensitivity Proximity Assays

SRI has developed a patent-pending technology that dramatically increases the sensitivity of traditional proximity assays through the combination of surface-enhanced fluorescence and lanthanide chelate fluorescent labels.

The sensitivity of proximity assays is limited by the enhancement factors of the reporter signal transducer, typically a traditional organic fluor, molecular beacon structure, or lanthanide chelate. Lanthanides are attractive because they are highly photostable, exhibit large Stokes shifts, and have narrow emission lines. This permits multiplexed detection, easy discrimination of excitation light from emissions, and long detection dwell times for maximum sensitivity. Assays based on lanthanides suffer, however, from poor overall sensitivity because of the low brightness and long emission lifetimes of the lanthanide dyes. Assays based on traditional fluors, on the other hand, can be photosensitive, limiting shelf life and potential applications. They also have relatively broad emission lines that hinder multiplexing.

Surface-enhanced fluorescence of lanthanide chelates using (for example) colloidal silver nanoparticles deposited on a surface dramatically improves the brightness of lanthanide-based fluors, and hence the sensitivity of lanthanide-based proximity assays.

SRI's platform technology allows for lanthanide-based systems to exhibit superior sensitivity together with proximity assay capability while retaining all of the other advantages of lanthanide chelate fluors, such as large Stokes shifts and narrow emission lines. These advantages permit the ready development of highly multiplexed proximity assays for either heterogeneous or homogeneous formats.

Such assays can be used for bioanalytical systems in either a research or clinical setting: nucleic acid binding, protein-protein binding, protein-ligand binding, cell-ligand binding, etc.

Contact: Eric Pearson, Vice President, Physical Sciences Division, at 650-859-3072 or eric.pearson@sri.com

Membranes and Forward Osmosis for Water Desalination

The need for clean, potable water has created a range of opportunities to advance innovative technologies aimed at increasing and improving the global supply of water for drinking, sanitary, agricultural, industrial, and energy applications.

SRI has developed and patented several technologies to address water purification, desalination through forward osmosis, and sludge decontamination. Our researchers have also developed new materials and specialized membranes for water desalination systems.

Contact: Alex Beavers, Commercial Ventures and Strategic Programs, alex.beavers@sri.com