Smoltek’s unfair advantage

Car­bon nanofibers are at the heart of our busi­ness. They allow us to cre­ate ultra-thin capac­i­tors with very high capac­i­tance rel­a­tive to their vol­ume. They make it pos­si­ble to offer cell mate­ri­als for elec­trolyz­ers that use only a frac­tion of the amount of irid­i­um used in con­ven­tion­al PEM elec­trolyz­ers. And they are the basis for future inno­va­tions and busi­ness opportunities. 

But…

One and all can make car­bon nanofibers.

Okay, that was an exag­ger­a­tion. Not all. But every­one with the nec­es­sary knowl­edge and equip­ment can do it. And they are not few.

In light of this rev­e­la­tion, you are right to ask your­self whether you have bet on the right horse. If car­bon nanofibers are not unique to Smoltek, what is? What gives Smoltek the edge over its com­peti­tors? What is Smoltek’s ‘unfair advan­tage’ – a unique com­pet­i­tive advan­tage that com­peti­tors sim­ply can­not match?

Well, let me tell you: We own the holy grail. Not the one Indi­ana Jones sought in The Last Cru­sade, but the holy grail of our field: a method to place and grow ultra-thin car­bon nanofibers pre­cise­ly on almost any sur­face, with  elec­tric con­tact between the sur­face and the fiber.

Rest sure we pro­tect­ed this unfair advan­tage. We have 80+ approved patents, and counting.

To illus­trate the pre­ci­sion with which we con­trol the process, we have cre­at­ed the world’s most minia­ture top­i­ary gar­den made of car­bon nanofibers. We have grown the tiny fibers to form our logo. (I know, it’s a pret­ty geeky thing to do, but that’s who we are).

But there is a catch. This gar­den is so small that you can’t walk in it. In fact, you will need a scan­ning elec­tron micro­scope to even see it. 

If I may guess, you don’t have a scan­ning elec­tron micro­scope lying around. Do you? Luck­i­ly we have one, so that we can show you how tiny these guys real­ly are. Just look below.

Note the mag­ni­fi­ca­tion lev­el at the bot­tom left. Swipe the image to the left on your phone or tablet or click the right arrow on your com­put­er to zoom in on the high­light­ed area.

Quite some­thing, isn’t it?

Did you see the hair strand in the first pic­ture? In that image, the mag­ni­fi­ca­tion is ‘only’ 69✕. In the last image, the mag­ni­fi­ca­tion is a crazy 50,000✕. Yet the car­bon nanofibers look skin­ny com­pared to the hair strand in the first image. The hair strand is between 10,000 and 15,000 times thick­er than the car­bon nanofibers.

It’s hard to grasp the dif­fer­ence just from num­bers. An anal­o­gy might help.

Imag­ine you’re a tourist in Paris, strolling around with your trusty guide­book. Mind you, it’s not a hefty brick, just an ordi­nary guide­book with a few hun­dred pages.

Now, pic­ture your­self arriv­ing at the base of the Eif­fel Tow­er. All around you, tourists look up in awe. But not you.

You lie on the ground and gen­tly place your closed guide­book before you. Nev­er mind that every­one has stopped look­ing at the Eif­fel Tow­er and now stares at you. You are not crazy; what you do is per­fect­ly normal.

Now, take a moment to com­pare the thick­ness of your book with the tow­er­ing height of the Eif­fel Tow­er. Right there, you’ll find the same stag­ger­ing dif­fer­ence in mag­ni­tude between the diam­e­ter of a car­bon nanofiber and a strand of hair.

Do you now appre­ci­ate how thin those fel­lows are?

Great! Then you can see what a huge achieve­ment it is to grow them in such a con­trolled way that they form our logo. (And don’t for­get, with elec­tric con­tact between the sur­face and the fiber. An achieve­ment in itself.)

It’s this capa­bil­i­ty that is our ‘unfair advan­tage’ – To grow a large num­ber of extreme­ly thin nanofibers, which the cur­rent is forced to fol­low up and down, for each indi­vid­ual fiber. That’s what makes our tech­nol­o­gy so supe­ri­or when it comes to shrink­ing phys­i­cal sur­faces while main­tain­ing elec­tri­cal properties. 

And this is what allow us to solve advanced mate­r­i­al engi­neer­ing prob­lems, such as cre­at­ing capac­i­tors with very high capac­i­tance in rela­tion to their vol­ume and reduc­ing the need for irid­i­um in PEM electrolyzers.

And it’s this tech­nol­o­gy, and the busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties it opens up, that make Smoltek such an excit­ing invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ty. Don’t you agree?

(By the way, I was not whol­ly truth­ful. It’s not nor­mal to lie down on the ground at the Eif­fel Tow­er. Just so you know.)