NBD Nano
A Water Repellent Friction Free Technology
Named after an unusually resilient beetle that lives in the arid African desert, Boston-based NBD (“Namib Beetle Design”) Nanotechnologies is putting an Air Force-developed technology to use to solve the opposite problem: waterproofing equipment and clothing.
The Namib Desert Beetle survives by using a combination of water-attracting and water-repelling elements on its back to harvest moisture from the air. Boston-area based NBD Nano initially focused on biomimicry to control the “wettability” of materials, starting first with clothing. One member of the company’s advisory board was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had been collaborating with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) on the development of a new series of chemical compounds with characteristics reminiscent of the Namib beetle’s shell.
Called “Fluorinated Polyhedral Oligomeric Silsesquioxane monomers,” or F-POSS, these compounds were first developed in AFRL laboratories in 2002, drawing attention from researchers for their ability to repel a wide range of liquids. Coatings capable of beading water had existed for some time, but it was widely believed that it wasn’t possible to create coatings that could repel fuels, oils, greases, and the like in similar ways—until the unique chemical structures of F-POSS did just that.
“It was a significant breakthrough in the field of chemical synthesis—a new kind of structure,” says Dr. Andrew Guenthner, team leader of AFRL’s engineering group. “It was not known in nature and believed to be impossible to do.”
The omniphobic (capable of repelling both water and oily liquids) surfaces F-POSS makes possible have a wide range of potential military applications. But how they would translate into wider use remained unclear. “We understood what the unique properties were in an academic sense,” Guenthner says. “We did not understand what the practical applications were—how could you use these characteristics?”
To that end, AFRL began collaborating with MIT, other universities, and government labs to determine where the technology could be useful. These collaborations caught the notice of researchers, including the MIT professor on NBD Nano’s advisory board. Before the end of 2013, NBD Nano had entered an agreement with AFRL to license the F-POSS technology. Through a non-exclusive patent license agreement, the company began work to combine F-POSS with its own proprietary materials to produce a range of coatings and additives.
“It was a very novel material that no one had really worked on before,” says Deckard Sorensen, co-founder and president of NBD Nano. “We realized there were a bunch of different applications we could bring this technology to.”First up were athletic clothing and footwear. Because F-POSS is thermally stable, it can be incorporated into plastics and other materials in ways that ensure the durability of its water-repellant characteristics.“When looking at athletic materials like shoes and clothing, it can become a permanent piece of the material, not just a coating,” says Miguel Galvez, NBD Nano’s co-founder and CEO. Sorensen calls F-POSS “a parent technology.” Since licensing the technology, NBD Nano has focused on modifying the materials for use in additional ways that “solve very difficult problems for our customers,” he says. To that end, NBD Nano has developed a line of water-repellant coatings and additives that last longer and don’t add significant steps to the manufacturing process. Trademarked as RepelShell, an homage to the beetle that first inspired the company’s founders, the technology allowed NBD Nano to gain a foothold in the consumer athletics apparel market.
“Without this intellectual property, the company would have taken a very different trajectory,” Galvez says. “We wouldn’t have such a strong place in the market.”The potential benefits go far beyond clothing. Galvez sees applications for RepelShell across a broad range of industries, including making glass and other automotive components bug and chemical resistant, providing waterproofing for electronic devices, and creating coatings for metal and glass surfaces that eliminate fingerprint smudges. Currently, there’s considerable buzz about RepelShell in the automotive industry, in part because the advent of self-driving technology has sparked a need to ensure that sensors and cameras stay dry and clean in on-the-road driving situations.
NBD Nano’s use of F-POSS is among of a number of applications for the material that have been spun out of AFRL in recent years. AFRL also is currently involved in a research-and-development collaboration with a California startup seeking to use F-POSS to help manufacturers reduce energy waste, and is collaborating with the University of Michigan on research that may ultimately play a role in improving fuel refining in remote areas. AFRL’s Guenthner says NBD’s work serves as an excellent example of theoretical science being used to improve consumer products. “It’s an opportunity where something originally developed as part of a rocket propulsion program can become part of something you wear every day,” he says.
In fact, NBD Nano’s successes with athletic gear ultimately may speed up the time it takes for the technology to find its way into wide scale adoption in uniforms and footwear for members of the armed forces, according to Guenthner. “[Licensing] was an unexpectedly good way for us to get a leg up in having the technology commercialized,” he says.For NBD Nano, licensing the technology has sparked continued growth. Founded in 2012, the company now has ten full-time employees and has opened a 4,400 square-foot facility in the Boston area with full manufacturing capabilities. It won some major venture capital funding in 2014 and anticipates further investments in the coming year.“We believe we’re at an inflection point where we’ll be entering the market in a number of different areas,” says Sorensen. “The goal in the next several years will be to establish ourselves as market leaders in the area of surface wettability.” NBD Nano’s founders credit AFRL for helping bring a viable technology to market.“We found the Air Force very useful in developing application science,” Sorensen says. “They are focused less on theory and more on practicality, which is important because companies are focused on solving real-world problems.”
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