Notice
Welcome to the New NoPo website. We’ve moved around things to make finding information very very very easy. We’d be happy to hear from you. -NoPo
Welcome to the New NoPo website. We’ve moved around things to make finding information very very very easy. We’d be happy to hear from you. -NoPo
The precision Nickel/Iron Carbonyl detector that we built with Dr.Stedman’s help is working just as planned. During preliminary testing, it was able to detect Carbonyls from <0.1PPB to close to >0.1PPM. We could have gone for lower levels if there was a way to decrease Carbonyl levels to less than the lower detection limits.
Just a quick update. We were scheduled to go live in early January 2012 and later by 14-April 2012. But unfortunately, we’ve missed these deadlines. It mostly has to do with extraneous factors way beyond our control like damage during shipping of our material and accident-prone fragile materials. We have a third run scheduled for next week and we hope to be back with some very good news. 🙂
The new HiPCO-3G makes use of a controlled Nickel/Iron Carbonyl generator to produce precise amounts of catalyst. The levels of catalyst max out at a few ppb as we will only need a few micrograms of the catalyst every minute. Now imagine trying to measure this level of Carbonyls in a small 10ml sample of the gas stream. It’d a bit hard. We tried looking for commercially availble techniques that would work for us. The last published Nickel Carbonyl detection at ppb levels dates back to the late 70’s ! And this made use of an FTIR. From the industry…
That’s the name for the reactor. Kelley chose HiPCO because the name sounded HiP and the new HiPCO had to sound a little more hippy. It’s been chirstened the HiPCO-3G to denote that it is pretty advanced. We’re depending on publicly available data to arrive at generations for the HiPCO’s. The original HiPCO built under Smalley is given a Generation-1 followed by a Generation-2 for the HiPCO modified by Bronikowski with a graphite heater and a Ceramic based thought experiment from the same time. The 3rd generation simply blows away all competition.
Dr.Vasant Choudhary, a scientist emeritus from the National Chemical Laboratory has joined NoPo as the Chief Advisor for Safety and CO usage. He brings in a huge experience and a perfect track record on safety. He has worked on Syngas (Carbon Monoxide + Hydrogen) systems for over 30 years and he has 48 patents and the Bhatnagar Award ( India’s highest Civilian Scientific Honour) to his credit.
The earlier plan was to make use of the Carbonyls in a liquid form. But Chemical companies in India and a major CVD manufacturer in Canada refused to ship the same because of Indian regulations. A kilogram of the Carbonyls would be classified as highly hazardous and there was no way that we were going to prepare it in house.After a lot of brainstorming inside and talking with Nickel experts (thanks to leads from the Nickel Institute) we managed to design an extremely safe catalyst delivery system. This eliminates the need to store any Catalyst. We will never have more…
We’ve decided to put on hold a plan to bring in new people. Since the reactor is still at a design stage we are leveraging expertise advice directly from people working in Nanotechnology. Srushti Automations has provided us access to a huge workforce to help augment NoPo which is acting more like a brain at this stage.Starting mid-September / October we will begin a hiring spree. The work at that time would be far more exciting. Please await us and thanks for your patience hirees.