PlasmaBound - innovating the lightweighting process

by Startacus Admin

The lowdown on PlasmaBound, the Dublin-based startup that's on a mission to make sustainable lightweight materials a standard feature across key industry verticals.

The heavier an object, the more energy and money are expended in moving that object. This applies to products in cargo; land, sea, and air vehicles; and even getting things into space. It’s a simple problem with an ostensibly simple solution: make things lighter. Lightweighting is a process of, as the name suggests, reducing the weight of objects by substituting heavy materials with lighter, usually stronger materials - such fibre-reinforced composites - and thus reducing those costs of transporting or running the thing. 

As well as energy and money expended, heavier vehicles - be that weight from their own construction or from their cargo - will produce more emissions, which will be reduced by the process of lightweighting. Until now, though, the process of lightweighting has not been reliable or cost-effective, clean, or simple.

Dublin-based deeptech, SaaS startup PlasmaBound is a UCD spinout that specialises in controlled polymer ablation technology. This can improve the process of lightweighting and bring it into the twenty-first century, reducing rejection rate, reducing labour intensiveness, increasing speed, and making the whole process more cost-effective. 

The startup has developed a plasma technology that is currently patent-pending, called ‘Atmospheric Plasma’ which, in their words, ‘no longer merely activates the polymeric surface of a fibre-reinforced composite material but selectively removes it (Ablates it) in a manner which causes no heat affected zones, leaves no residue and reveals in a repeatable manner undamaged fibres to act as an anchor matrix for structural adhesives’. Tests have shown the results of this process to be stronger and more frequently successful (they say every time) than other methods, as well as reducing the pre-treatment process down to an automated, single-step one.

In May, PlasmaBound announced that they had raised €2.35 million in a round led by Act Venture Capital, with participation from the Atlantic Bridge University Fund, Enterprise Ireland, and private investors. This comes after a 2020 round of €1.1 million, led by Atlantic Bridge.

 

 

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• #industry
• #
• #composite
• #lightweighting
• #carbon
• #dublin
• #innovation
• #plasma

Published on: 26th May 2022