When Evan Stacy was knee-deep in his Ph.D. program at the University of Southern Mississippi, a side project evolved into tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in carbon fiber production. Today, he’s commercializing that technology through the Innovation Crossroads program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
Innovating in Square One
When carbon fiber is produced, step one of the process is turning liquid material into a solid. Most carbon fiber today starts with a synthetic polymer called “polyacrylonitrile (PAN).” Then, it undergoes extrusion and a spinning process to solidify the material.
Stacy explained that many people are familiar with carbon fiber, yet it has not been widely adopted for use. Why?
“It’s expensive to make. You can point to a number of different places in the production stream that contribute to that cost, but we’re focused on the initial step where you take a liquid material and use a catalyst to make it solid,” he said.
That’s the big bottleneck of the carbon fiber industry, he shared.
“If you have a really strong reason to innovate in square one of the production process, you have to do it,” he said. “That’s why we’re committed to changing the method.”
Stacy’s company is called “Lumios Materials,” named after the Greek word for “light.”