How do you sell something that is too small for your customers to see? And how do you stop low quality counterfeits when they look identical to your product? A Belfast-based startup is tackling these challenges by turning chemistry into products anyone can understand.
InkIntelligent was built out of the Chemistry school at Queen’s University Belfast, from the work of Prof Andrew Mills on inks that change colour in contact with specific chemicals. The resulting product couldn’t be simpler, it’s a marker pen. Ink, drawn from the pen onto a surface, will change colour to identify the presence of the target chemical in moments, thus allowing the invisible to become plainly visible.
The first application of the InkIntelligent pen is on self-cleaning materials. We see them everywhere. Well, we don’t exactly see them… Glass is a common example. Many large buildings have self-cleaning glazing. By coating the glass in nanoparticles of titanium dioxide (TiO2), any organic material (ie. dirt) on the glass is broken down in sunlight and washed away by rain. Furthermore, the rainwater itself doesn’t hang around long or leave many streaks, because it behaves differently on the coated surface. Such coatings are invisible, needing only a few nanometers’ thickness to operate, and typically halve the cost of window cleaning.
Other self-cleaning surfaces abound. Examples include concrete, fabrics (eg. furniture covers), paint, tiles (eg. in the bathroom), and plastics. And these materials don’t just break down dirt but sometimes other microscopic problems too, like bacteria and pollutants, making them popular in places like hospitals and swimming pools. In all cases, the same problem exists: you can’t see nanoparticles on the surface to know that the product has been coated. The cleaning process itself would be proof but it can take a few days for noticeable results. However, draw on a surface with an InkIntelligent pen and, after a couple of minutes’ exposure to sunlight or UV, the ink will have changed colour if the surface is indeed self-cleaning.
Self-cleaning material manufacturers could benefit primarily from now being able to demonstrate the authenticity of their products to their customers, in a swift, visual fashion. These inks could also be used to expose the fake products that are being sold for a premium price, claiming to be self-cleaning. They also lend themselves to quality control and assurance in the manufacturing process.
Going beyond self-cleaning surfaces, InkIntelligent has a potential pipeline of inks that could detect many different chemicals with some vital consequences. These could include carbon dioxide, such as to show if a fizzy drink has enough gas in it. Oxygen detection could be useful to detect faults in the modified atmospheric food packaging (“MAP”) we see throughout our supermarkets. Other inks could identify humidity levels, or provide a sunburn warning on the skin.
At this time, customer feedback has been very positive and sales, mostly through the company’s online store, have been bolstered by order inquiries in the thousands of units. The scientific lab behind the inks has another wing, providing ISO-level testing for self-cleaning surfaces where required. Together, the brains working in the lab have decades of world-class knowledge and access to the tools to develop an extensive product range.
- See more at: http://www.nispconnect.org/techwatch/inkintelligent-making-the-invisible-visible-with-inks-that-detect-the-presence-of-chemicals/#sthash.XbiQ8I7x.dpuf
