by David Pescovitz

Scientific American presents four toys that inspired innovations in science and technology. For example, University of Pittsburgh physicist Jeremy Levy had an Etch A Sketch in mind when developing a new way to fabricate nanoscale transistors. And UC Irvine biomedical engineer Michelle Khine used Shrinky Dink technology to make microfluidic systems for “labs on a chip.

From Scientific American:
“Khine knew that when Shrinky Dinks condense, any ink lines on the plastic become raised–and that’s precisely what she sought in a microfluidics mold. She bought Shrinky Dink plastic designed for computer printer use, printed a pattern, and baked it for several minutes in her toaster oven. The results exceeded her expectations. Instead of just making molds, Khine ultimately developed a technique to make microfluidics chips directly from Shrinky Dink plastic. “It actually worked really well,” Khine says, well enough to found a company based on that basic premise. To create products such as stem cell research devices and solar cells, Shrink Nanotechnologies has developed a new material that trumps the toy’s abilities. Says Khine: “Shrinky Dinks shrink by 60 percent, but our new polymer shrinks 95 percent. And the properties shrink more consistently.”

OPTISOL SOLAR CONCENTRATOR BASED ON NANOTECHNOLOGY

Shrink Nanotechnologies Inc., is a publicly traded nanotechnology company (OTCBB: INKN) involved in developing products and licensing opportunities in the medical diagnostics field, solar energy production, environmental sensors and biotechnology research and development tools businesses. The company’s renewable energy subsidiary, Shrink Solar, LLC, has recently formed its renewable energy team. This team includes academic and industry collaborators, including Michelle Khine, the scientific founder of the Shrink nano-technology platform; and Sayantani Ghosh, assistant professor, School of Natural Sciences, University of California.

The renewable energy team will focus on product development and optimization, all in an effort to achieve commercialization of the company’s OptiSol solar concentrator.

The OptiSol solar concentrator is a nanotechnology-based plastic solar concentrator. It falls into a class of devices known as luminescent solar concentrators. It is made from layers of the company’s NanoShrink material, nanocrystal “doped” glass and/or plexiglas (poly(methyl methacrylate) [PMMA]). The company has also worked with environmentally friendly corn-based plastics (polylactic acid [PLA]) and has integrated various types of quantum dot semiconductor nanoparticles into this layered structure. The manufacturing process differs slightly depending on the application. For example, “windows” require transparent panes whereas “siding” can be translucent or opaque. The company has also designed unique light trapping and light wave guiding mechanisms into the Optisol system.

Silicon converts the near infrared wavelengths into electricity more efficiently than the UV-Visible wavelengths. However, sunlight is mostly in the UV-Visible spectral region. Sunlight and silicon do not match perfectly, producing heat. The OptiSol solar concentrator makes them match: regular sunlight enters the concentrator and is shifted, emerging as silicon-optimal light. Certain iterations of the materials are transparent and hence there is possibility of light getting transmitted through the concentrator surface rather than getting reflected. There may be some reflections at the Photo Voltaic (PV) Cell- Concentrator interface but total internal reflection effectively traps and re-circulates the light within the device which indicates the ability of the device to absorb diffused light and off angle light to some degree. As a result, the loss of the total spectrum as heat or reflection is minimized to a great extent.

The device basically works on two principles namely concentration of the incident light onto a small amount of silicon and shifting of sunlight to illuminate the silicon cell with a better spectrum. The concentration of a large amount of incident light onto a large concentrator surface and then transferring it to a small photovoltaic (PV) cell proves to be an optimal solution since the cost of a plastic OptiSol solar concentrator is much less expensive than the cost of a silicon solar cell which drives down the system’s total cost. Silicon has much higher external quantum efficiency for near infrared (NIR) spectral region than for ultraviolet (UV)-visible region. Shifting visible sunlight to NIR allows the optical energy to be converted more efficiently without any changes to the PV cell itself. The OptiSol solar concentrator offers a number of advantages.

Concentrating solar power systems typically use mirrors, lenses and tracking devices to focus sunlight onto a small photovoltaic device. The OptiSol concentrator however does not employ any of these optical elements. It acts more like a fiberoptic “sheet,” trapping and guiding sunlight to a side-mounted PV cell. Since this design can be achieved using plastic rather than glass, the devices tend to be low-cost, lightweight and durable. While the other competing technologies use short-lived fluorescent dyes; and the materials used in this concentrator have very desirable life spans.

Talking to the Technical Insights team, Mark L. Baum, CEO of Shrink Nanotechnologies said, “One of the biggest problems we ran into was the degrading of our photovoltaics. If we did not solve this problem, the lifetime of our concentrator would have been measured in minutes. Thanks to the efforts of our research and development team, that lifetime has been extended almost indefinitely. While the concentrator itself is nearly indestructible under day-to-day conditions, the actual silicon PV cells are rather fragile. While we have resolved this issue, constantly breaking paper-thin panels was frustrating.”

The major application of the concentrator would be in functionalizing nearly every exterior surfaces of a home or building. The roof, windows, doors, siding, and so on, can all be transformed into power generators, with minimal aesthetic impact. Smaller scale applications would cater to consumer electronics, military devices and recreational markets. According to Baum, the largest market Nanotech Alert opportunity is in a roof-top application and it, like the siding applications, would be an opaque product. Their rooftop application can be completely integrated with the underlying ancillary systems required to make a traditional flat panel silicon PV system work. However, the company also envisions a day when the surfaces (windows and other plastic appendages) of a battery powered vehicle will be functionalized, allowing a commuter to re-fuel his or her vehicle with incident solar light during the work day.

Shrink is funding academic laboratories under a licensing and research agreement with the Regents of the University of California (UC). Through agreements with the Regents of the UC, the company holds exclusive license (for all fields of use) to the core patents related it’s solar concentrator technology. Shrink has also developed additional applications based on the original patent applications and is thus continuing to grow its own IP portfolio. In the near future, the company plans to build ultra low-cost, upgradable and flexible solar concentrators, and will integrate products based on this technology into clean buildings and other nonfunctional surfaces, dramatically impacting our dependence on non-renewable sources of energy.

Summary

Oils are extracted from below ground as a feedstock for plastic at the moment, among other things this is a finite resource. Oils extracted from potatoes and algae can be sustained as long as the stock being acquired is not from the food chain. The high price of mineral oil would attract new natural oil producing farmers.

Analysis

If oil does reach a high, (above US $95 a barrel) and continues on an upward spiral there may not be an alternative, other than grow the stock.

Depleting resources will create high prices and this will push innovation. Take plastic, which is used in many applications including food packaging, car parts and building materials, it could be replaced by other material such as ceramics and wood but plastic is an ideal material due to malleable and flexible properties and in some cases its ability to be recycled. So to simply replace one raw material which has been used for years, for another which can be extracted from algae would not be an issue, in fact there would be better control of pricing, due to sustained supply. The other important question is whether there be enough raw material to to produce Bio Plastic, and if the raw material from algae and potatoes can be use in other product such as Bio fuel’s.

Taking algae alone there are many research efforts in the fuel area. The New Biopalstc Association has been launched to catalyze the research and market to the public. Companies such as Shrink Nanotechnologies is one of several companies that is using bioplastics to find a new way of making devices that will minimize the use of increasingly scarce rare metals for its solar concentrator. So the future for bioplastic would be one of organic growth.

Future Tech

Some innovations are well past the drawing board stage, but not quite ready to roll into full production. These are some that should be making the news within the coming year.

Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc., Carlsbad, California produces a shrinkable plastic film. “One for this film is building PV solar cells, but not the type that are normally envisioned. Our technology involves solar concentrators,” Mark Baum, ceo says.

Ms. Sayantani Ghosh, PhD, assistant professor of Physics at UC Merced and consultant to Shrink Nanotechnologies explains that this technology is a completely unique process.

“In a solar cell you take sunlight, and convert it into electricity,” she says. “What we are doing is taking sunlight and converting it into light of a different colour. This different coloured light then falls onto existing silicon PV. The colour of the light is set to the PV’s preferred colour. It is like straining the sunlight into colours that will enhance the efficiency of the silicon.”

“Think about a window. Instead of glass, the surface of the pane would be a very think solar concentrator between two layers of glass. The light of day will hit that solar concentrator. By using crystalline silicon around the edges of the pane, that silicon would absorb the photons coming off the quantum dots in the film. This would be absorbed into the system and ultimately be turned into electricity that could be used. This same technology can apply to home siding and roof shingles. It’s all about functionalising the surfaces of the buildings that people live and work in,” Baum says.

By Terrence O’Brien

Do you remember Shrinky Dinks? That’s okay. Neither do most of the Switched staffers — the bunch of whippersnappers they are [Ed Note: Not true. We love them.]. The once-popular, plastic arts-and-craft set, which first hit the scene in 1973, allowed children to color and cut out shapes on a thin sheet of plastic. When the shapes were put in the oven, they would shrink to one-third of their original width, becoming thick and rigid. Well, it turns out that making tacky charms is just scratching the surface of this toy’s potential.

Back in 2006, University of California at Irvine assistant professor Michelle Khine couldn’t afford to outfit her lab with the $100,000 worth of equipment needed to create microfluidic chips. Frustrated and impatient, she turned to an updated version of Shrinky Dinks — one that lets you run the aforementioned plastic sheets through a standard inkjet or laser printer. Needing the chips to create medical diagnostic tests, she took a shot in the dark by printing her chip designs on Shrinky Dinks, and then baking them. When the sheets shrunk, the ink clumped together and formed tiny ridges. She then used the minis as molds for the circuits she made out of a flexible polymer called PDMS.

To her (and everybody else’s) surprise, the cheapo chips worked. They’re not as accurate as traditional silicon chips, but, according to Khine, they work for most applications, cost less than your average fast-food combo meal, and take only a few minutes to make. What, a few years ago, was just a quirky experiment has been more successful than anyone could have possibly imagined. Since that fateful day, Khine has successfully used the chips to grow stem cells in heart muscle, and she even hopes to use them in the field to diagnose diseases like HIV.

Encouraged by her success, Khine has started experimenting with the process. She’s tried layering multiple sheets, scratching out designs with a syringe instead of printing with ink, and even printing with metal — which could potentially be used to build cheap and efficient solar panels.

Just remember this the next time you laugh at that one friend who refuses to throw out her Easy-Bake Oven. That cardboard-flavored-brownie maker might just be used to cure cancer.

by Cory Doctrow

CCrawford sez, “Michelle Khine couldn’t afford the $100,000 fabrication gear to make micro-fluidic chips needed for chip-based diagnostic tests. She turned to Shrinky-Dinks and found a new way to solve the problem.”

To test her idea, she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal.

Khine began using the chips in her experiments, but she didn’t view her toaster-oven hack as a breakthrough right away. “I thought it would be something to hold me over until we got the proper equipment in place,” she says. But when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world. “I had no idea people were going to be so interested,” Khine says.

Shana Leonard, Editor

Biomedical engineering isn’t exactly child’s play—unless you’re Michelle Khine. The 32-year-old engineer drew inspiration from a popular low-tech children’s toy to fabricate a sophisticated yet inexpensive microfluidic device that demonstrates the power of creative thinking.

The field of microfluidics has attracted widespread interest in the medical device sector. Following the ubiquitous biomedical trend of miniaturization, microfluidic systems have tremendous potential in next-generation clinical diagnostic and lab-on-a-chip devices. Unfortunately, the diminutive devices can also come with significant overhead.

Primarily employing precision etching or lithography techniques on silicon substrates, microfluidic chip fabrication can require equipment sporting a six-figure price tag. Khine discovered this harsh reality when embarking on microfluidics research in her first lab at the University of California’s Merced campus several years ago. And she realized that she had to get creative if she wanted to pursue her research. Taking a stroll down memory lane led Khine to a toy she enjoyed in her youth: Shrinky Dinks. Consisting of plastic sheets fashioned into shapes, Shrinky Dinks are designed to be decorated and then placed into an oven for two minutes. During that time, the plastic shrinks to roughly 1/3 its original size and becomes nine times thicker.

A seemingly magical miracle to children, the toy could serve, Khine thought, as a simple platform for microfluidic systems. “I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for microfluidics,” Khine told MIT’s Technology Review, which named her a 2009 Young Innovator.

Her hypothesis was correct. The Shrinky Dinks proved to be a sufficient material on which Khine could print an AutoCADgenerated channel design. When heated in an oven, the ink clumped and formed ridges. Upon cooling of the plastic, Khine poured the polymer PDMS on the surface of the toy. As it hardened, the ink ridges created minute channels in the surface of the flexible polymer. Removing the PMDS from the Shrinky Dink mold yielded the final product. Since her initial prototypes, Khine has moved on to etching the channel design directly in the Shrinky Dink using syringe tips, a technique that produces the narrow but deep channels desired for microfluidics.

Although Khine admits there are some flaws in her method, it is a truly unique and functional approach to microfluidic system design. Using a children’s toy that is sold in packs at the store for typically less than $20, Khine is able to produce—in mere minutes—a unique and functional microfluidic system. This kind of innovative thinking and determination is what spurs true progress. Researchers, designers, and engineers should follow Khine’s example and problem solve using knowledge gleaned outside of the lab as well. After all, inspiration can come from anywhere, and, as cliché as it sounds, it’s important to think outside the box. Unless, like Khine, you find inspiration inside the toy box.

Oliver J. Chiang, Forbes.com

Michelle Khine is the ‘MacGyver’ of bioengineering. Kline has invented a quick-and-dirty way to manufacture medical diagnostic chips, usually a costly and laborious procedure. But where the scrappy ’80s TV show character had his trusty Swiss army knife, Khine has Shrinky Dinks. That’s right:–the plastic sheet that shrinks to approximately one-third its original size when baked in a household oven and is more typically used by kids for making key chains and other knickknacks.

Specifically, Khine used Shrinky Dinks to make microfluidic chips, whose dimensions are measured in millimeters. Widely known as “labs on a chip,” microfluidic chips allow scientists and doctors to run experiments and diagnostic tests– for conditions like cancer and infectious diseases–cheaply and portably. Creating these chips, however, is very expensive, requiring equipment that costs anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Production used to take days and required a perfectly sterile environment.In 2006, Khine, then an assistant professor at UC Merced, wanted to run some experiments using custom microfluidic chips, but she didn’t have the money to make them. Recalling her favorite
childhood toy, she improvised.

Khine took a Shrinky Dink sheet, used a laser printer to print a pattern on it and baked it in a toaster oven. The ink particles on the shrunken sheet bunched together to form ridges–effectively creating a mold upon which Khine poured a plastic polymer. And presto-shrinko: The researcher had discovered a way to make microfluidic chips in minutes at a cost of a few dollars per chip.

Imagine a tint on your windows that was actually an inexpensive and harnessing the power of the sun without having to track the movements of the sun during the day – just by absorbing diffuse light.

This technology is already here and may be commercially available very soon. On the nano-level, the amazing physical properties of matter allow incredible things to happen. Nanotechnology deals with components, products or systems that operate on the scale of a nanometer—one-one millionth of a meter. On this scale, things can behave differently.

California – based Shrink Nanotechnologies Inc. (OTCBB: INKN) is developing methods to unleash the power of nano-sized objects. With its proprietary ShrinkChip Manufacturing Process™, it is designing ultra light-absorbent nano-powered plastic solar cells and treating them with their patent-pending process in rder to make them function in a way that has not been seen in any commercially available solar cell. The ompany’s solar cells, which are designed to be constructed from corn-based plastic using non-toxic photovoltaic materials (unlike many competitors who are using very nasty poisonous materials to build their solar cells), are cheaper to produce renewable energy. Download The Full Article

by Bradley B. Fikes, North County Times

CARLSBAD — For a scientist eager to begin work, few things are more frustrating than being stuck without equipment. Michelle Khine turned that frustration into an entirely new technology and a new company.

Shrink Nanotechnologies Inc. is developing an array of products based on Khine’s creative application of a toy called Shrinky Dinks. The publicly traded company (traded over the counter as INKN) is applying Khine’s technology to a variety of medical and solar energy devices.

By using a manufacturing technique inspired by the toy instead of costly machinery, Shrink Nanotechnologies says it can greatly reduce the cost of these devices.

Last month, Khine was named one of 35 Top Innovators Under 35 Worldwide by MIT Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Khine, 32, and other winners will be recognized at Technology Review’s EmTech09 Conference next week.

Khine developed her technology as a faculty member at UC Merced, the state system’s newest campus. In 2006, Khine, now at UC Irvine, described the technology to her friend Mark Baum.

He and another investor, Jim Panther, decided to form a company around her technology. “We are in negotiations with several companies right now,” said Khine, the company’s scientific adviser. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to disclose their names, but they’re big companies.”

Khine’s goal was to develop ultra-small “microfluidics” devices for medical applications. But without the proper equipment, still on order for the new university, Khine cast about for other options.

Microfluidics involves channelling fluids into tiny passages where they can be processed.

The concept is analogous to the development of transistors, which made smaller, more powerful electronics devices possible.

So Khine turned to Shrinky Dinks, a childhood favorite of hers. Shrinky Dinks are thin plastic disks that can be printed with designs. When heated, they contract to be one-third the size and nine times thicker.

Khine printed a microfluidics circuit pattern onto a Shrinky Dink disk, and heated it in a toaster oven. The pattern shrank, and the lines of ink rose to form tiny channels, similar to those made with the more expensive equipment Khine was waiting for.

Baum said he and Panther founded Shrink Nanotechnologies in Carlsbad because of their ties to North San Diego County, and a desire to be close to UCSD, a major center of biomedical research. Baum lives in Del Mar and Panther lives in Carlsbad. “We wanted to build a business in a community where we had roots and we felt we could make a difference,” Baum said, “and Carlsbad and this part of San Diego County was a natural fit for us.”

Khine remains a full-time UCI faculty member but says Shrink Nanotechnologies is constantly in her thoughts.
“This is my little baby, so I spend most of my waking hours thinking about the technology,” Khine said.