Licensing opportunities
Physical sciences
Our licencing opportunities in Physical sciences are shown below.
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Database of contemporary spoken English
Recordings of speakers with ‘Standard Southern British English’ pronunciation have been collected and transcribed orthographically by researchers in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge.
The database was recorded with forensic phonetic research in mind, but serves very generally as an extensive source of contemporary spoken English. It comprises studio quality recordings of 100 male speakers aged 18-25 performing four tasks involving different speaking styles: taking part in a simulated police interview, making a telephone call with an “accomplice” (recorded simultaneously and over the public telephone network), reading a passage, and reading a set of sentences.
Compared to alternative databases of comparable size, this database provides, for a tightly homogeneous population of speakers, a spectrum of speaking styles with a substantial number of words and phrases (elicited by design) in common. It is expected to be of interest to companies involved in a variety of speech technologies, and is available to license from the Economic and Social Data Service.
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Supramolecular Microcapsules
The next generation of "smart" materials will require molecular self-assembly to achieve the high degrees of functionality and complexity that are required for a wide range of applications such as heat absorbers, self-healing paints, optical sensors and drug delivery mechanisms.
Professor Chris Abell and Dr. Oren Scherman have developed a new technique for manufacturing such functional materials in large volumes, using supramolecular, stimuli-responsive polymers.
Aqueous microfluidic droplets dispersed in oil are used as templates for building discrete supramolecular assemblies. These assemblies form highly uniform microcapsule structures, the shells of which can be tailored to enable and monitor, passive or active release of encapsulated contents to meet a range of market needs.
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Reproducible, reusable, self-calibrating SERS substrate for single-molecule recognition
Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) is an ultra-sensitive, non-destructive spectroscopic technique that enables characterisation and identification of molecules for a wide variety of potential applications including environmental sensing, forensic analysis and medical diagnosis. It potentially replaces fluorescence techniques due to its photon yield, lack of bleaching and label-free molecular signatures.
Wide adoption of SERS-based techniques remains, however, limited by lack of reproducibility and reusability of the SERS substrates. Recently, scientists at Cambridge University developed a novel approach, based on cucurbiturils, that has the potential to dramatically improve the usability of SERS-based techniques.
By accurately controlling the gaps between aggregates of metal nanoparticles using cucurbilturils as rigid sub-nanometre ‘cages’, analyte molecules can be held in the intense electric field regions between the nanoparticles providing the possibility of reliable, highly sensitive, molecular recognition based on SERS. Not only does this technique open up the possibility of using SERS to identify single molecules that have no affinity for metal surfaces, it is also potentially self-calibrating due to the Raman-activity of the cucurbituril spacer molecules themselves and reusable due to the triggered release of analyte molecules from the cucurbilturil ‘cages’ by chemical, photo-initiation or thermal means.
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Novel nanoporous material for filtration
Nanoporous materials have many applications including the formation of high surface area electrodes that increase the efficiency of fuel cells, photovoltaics, OLED devices and membrane separation technologies, such as desalination.
The main advantage of these materials is that they can be bicontinuous, which means that the porous portions of the material are completely accessible. Currently it is difficult to create such a structure in a controlled manner, as this requires controlled chemistry and long processing times.
This novel invention is a robust method of creating nanoporous materials from copolymeric systems. Through the application of the UV radiation. cross-linking and photodegradation convert an initially spherical, micellar system into a bicontinuous matrix of polymer and voids.
The resulting template can be used as-is or can, with further, simple chemical transformations, be converted into inorganic nanoporous materials that have other exotic functionalities such as water splitting, tunable magnetoelectric properties, and high surface area electrodes.
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High Density Carbon Nanotube Arrays
A method for forming small catalytic nanoparticles at high densities over a substrate to serve as nuclei for the growth of carbon nanotubes (or CNTs). The inventors have experimentally grown CNTs with densities of 5•1012 cm-12 (five times greater than the closest rival technology), and expect that arrays of CNTs with densities of 1013 cm-2 or higher can be grown using this method.
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Multi-level Phase Device
This technology comprises a device geometry, based on the flexoelectric-optic effect in a chiral nematic liquid crystal, which is capable of linear multi-level phase modulation and frame rates in excess of several kHz. The multi-level phase modulation from these devices has potential for application in holographic projectors, optical correlators and adaptive optics.
This technology offers the advantage over existing devices of having the combination of multi-phase modulation and frame rates in excess of several kHz. By employing flexoelectric devices one can now modulate the phase of light at frame rates well above those detected by the eye, thereby enabling improvement of image quality in holographic projectors as well as the implementation of real-time adaptive ophthalmic imaging for high resolution diagnosis of retinal disease.
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Water-Cooled Transuranic Waste Incinerating Nuclear Reactor
Researchers in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge have discovered a novel method of fuelling nuclear reactors which enables the virtual elimination of long lived highly radioactive waste. The fuel is a mixture of Thorium and existing waste, which is fed into either an existing Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) or a new reactor built to the proven PWR or Reduced Moderation Water Reactor design. The reactor availability and the fuel reprocessing requirements are expected to be similar to that of existing operating reactors, with the significant benefit of removing highly radioactive material from the environment. This method also provides a way to exploit the planet's considerable Thorium resources using existing well-proven reactor technology.
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Recycling of Lead Battery Paste
A new process has been developed that has the potential to transform the lead battery recycling industry. The method uses organic reagents (derived from renewable bio-sources) to recycle the lead-bearing paste from waste batteries into a form which can be used directly as the lead oxide precursor for manufacturing new lead battery paste. This method has considerable benefits over the high temperature methods that are conventionally used to recycle lead battery paste into metallic lead.
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Liquid Crystal Polarisation Controller
A unique polarisation control system utilising the flexoelectric effect exhibited by chiral nematic liquid crystals responding rapidly (100µs to 1ms) under the influence of an externally applied electric field.
The system provides switching angles of over 90 degrees, stable materials over wide operating temperature ranges, and precise control of polarisation state.
These characteristics make the system ideal for use in polarisation controllers to reduce the effects of polarisation mode dispersion (PMD), endless polarisation controllers, optical routers, and liquid-crystal displays.
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'Inerter' - Suspension Damping Technology
The 'Inerter' is a novel passive device which allows designers of ride-control and suspension/damping systems the ability to realise performance levels that were previously only possible with actively controlled architectures. The device may be used on its own or in conjunction with traditional ride-control building blocks, to allow the designer cheap and simple, passive access to the full range of suspension characteristics. The device promises improvements over traditional technologies in areas such as passenger comfort, heavy vehicles dynamics and the handling of high-performance vehicles.
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Microcapillary Films
A manufacturing process for embedding multiple parallel micro-capillaries into flat, flexible polymer tapes and films has been developed. Application areas include chemical and biochemical analysis, medical applications, heat exchangers and pressure sensing applications.
The shape and size of these micro-capillaries can be easily controlled, ranging in diameter from 5 to 500 microns, and having circular, elliptical or diamond cross-sections, allowing transport of liquids or gases at pressures as high as 50 bar. The capillary walls can also be designed to be semi-permeable or catalytic.
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Critical Current Density Enhancement in YBCO
Enhancement of critical current densities by an order of magnitude in YBCO in self fields or applied fields with no lowering of the critical temperature. The enhancement, by incorporating rare earth tantalates into the YBCO, is effective even in thick films and over wide angular ranges of applied field.
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Gaussian Approximational Potential
Gaussian Approximation Potential (GAP) is a novel atomistic modelling technique that combines accuracy with speed. By inferring the energy of an atom from the position and identity of its neighbours using a precomputed database of exact quantum mechanical solutions, the potential energy surface of a system of atoms and molecules is approximated.
This methodology allows a controllable compromise to be made between the accuracy of Quantum Chemistry models and the speed of Interatomic Potential methods, with applications in a diverse range of fields including pharmaceuticals, aerospace, electronics and biotechnology.