Shafiq Kabir appointed head of volume processes within the hydrogen business area

Shafiq Kabir foun­ded Smol­tek in Decem­ber 2005, out of sci­entif­ic curi­os­ity and with the ambi­tion to devel­op tech­nic­al solu­tions based on nano­struc­tures that can be use­ful in many fields. Since the start, he has meth­od­ic­ally developed the com­pany’s tech­no­logy plat­form based on cata­lyt­ic growth of con­duct­ive nano­struc­tures, and where much of the applic­a­tion devel­op­ment has been focused on car­bon nanofibers.

“I star­ted Smol­tek because of my ambi­tion to drive my research res­ults in nan­o­tech­no­logy towards indus­tri­al use. By switch­ing to devel­op­ment on a com­mer­cial basis, we wanted to make the pos­sib­il­it­ies of nan­o­tech­no­logy avail­able on a much lar­ger scale.”

Shafiq Kabir

Smol­tek’s big break­through came around 2017, when the semi­con­duct­or industry showed a sig­ni­fic­ant interest in the com­pany’s capa­cit­or tech­no­logy (CNF-MIM) – a tech­no­logy based on cre­at­ing energy-effi­cient com­pon­ents with smal­ler form factors and with main­tained elec­tric­al per­form­ance. The com­pany’s capa­cit­or tech­no­logy has now developed into its own busi­ness area, where the group com­pany Smol­tek Semi is today in the pro­cess of devel­op­ing and com­mer­cial­iz­ing ultra-thin capa­cit­ors togeth­er with YAGEO, one of the world’s largest man­u­fac­tur­ers of pass­ive elec­tron­ic components.

In 2020, Smol­tek began to eval­u­ate oth­er areas for the com­pany’s nan­o­tech­no­logy plat­form, and the fol­low­ing year this effort star­ted to focus on using the tech­no­logy for the huge growth of the fossil-free hydro­gen mar­ket. Today, the hydro­gen busi­ness is run by the group com­pany Smol­tek Hydro­gen, which plans for a large scale-up of the com­pany’s tech­no­logy solu­tions to elec­tro­lyz­ers – a mar­ket seg­ment with­in the green hydro­gen eco­nomy that is estim­ated to increase from today’s SEK 30 bil­lion to SEK 650 bil­lion in 2030,¹ of which around 10 % is address­able to Smoltek’s cell mater­i­al.²

Shafiq is back in Smol­tek – with a focus on scal­ing up volume pro­cesses
As the founder of Smol­tek, Shafiq Kabir has been the driv­ing force behind the devel­op­ment of Smol­tek’s tech­no­logy and he served as the Chief Innov­a­tion Officer of the com­pany until Janu­ary 2021, when he took a break from the nan­o­tech­no­logy industry to com­plete an Exec­ut­ive MBA program.

“I am pas­sion­ate about green tech­no­logy. And now that Smol­tek is invest­ing in fossil-free hydro­gen, it’s the per­fect match for me. It is about how to cre­ate the right innov­a­tion cul­ture and part­ner­ships to devel­op tech­no­logy for fossil-free raw mater­i­als and energy types in order to reach the goal of car­bon diox­ide-neut­ral emis­sions, or towards “net-zero”.

Shafiq Kabir, Head of Volume Pro­cesses at Smol­tek Hydrogen

In his new role, Shafiq will be head of volume pro­cesses in the group com­pany Smol­tek Hydro­gen, where he will devel­op and eval­u­ate con­cepts for volume man­u­fac­tur­ing of Smotek’s cell mater­i­al to elec­tro­lyz­ers (ECM) which is now being developed. The focus will be on the actu­al pro­cesses used to pro­duce nano­struc­tures and coat­ings in order to suc­cess­fully scale them up to indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ing. The over­all goal is to deliv­er the desired product char­ac­ter­ist­ics even in mass pro­duc­tion. Work­ing closely with the entire Smol­tek Hydro­gen team, Shafiq will be involved in all ongo­ing pro­jects around man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cesses, cor­ro­sion pro­tec­tion, iridi­um depos­ition and whole cell eval­u­ations for the cell mater­i­al that are done in day-to-day operations.

“The mar­ket for green hydro­gen pro­duc­tion is grow­ing rap­idly, and and Smol­tek Hydro­gen­’s mater­i­als tech­no­logy for iridi­um coat­ing (ECM) to elec­tro­lyz­ers allows the com­pany to lower the cost of new elec­tro­lyz­ers as the industry scales up and iridi­um prices soar. The mater­i­al tech­no­logy also offers great oppor­tun­it­ies to reduce the size of new hydro­gen plants”.

Ellinor Ehrn­berg, Pres­id­ent of Smol­tek Hydrogen

1. Source: Glob­al Mar­ket Insights ↩︎
2. Source: Fraunhofer ↩︎