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NEI Corporation receives new Patent Allowance

October 8, 2019

Somerset, NJ (USA) – NEI Corporation announced today that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has recently issued a notice of allowance to the company on a patent application for producing a new class of energetic, core-shell nanoparticles.

Core-shell nanoparticles with a metal core can be used in various applications, such as energetic, pyrotechnics, joining, medical imaging, liquid hydrocarbon fuels, munitions, and energy storage. However, the presence of an oxide layer on the surface of the core metal nanoparticles can significantly reduce the performance of the core-shell nanoparticles. Consequently, the negative impact of the oxide layer outweighs the benefits of high enthalpy nanoparticles. NEI’s patent is directed at synthesizing a new core-shell nanoparticle structure comprised of a metal core, a metal boride intermediate layer, and an outer metal or metal oxide shell. The key characteristic of this core-shell structure is that it allows the use of both pristine metal, as well as oxygen containing metal particles, whereby the oxide surface layer of the metal particles is transformed into metal boride.

Metal-metal boride-metal based core-shell particles and a method to produce the same

Abstract: A new class of energetic nanoparticles and a method to produce the same. The energetic nanoparticles are differentiated from other metallic energetic nanoparticles by their core-shell nanostructure, including an intermediate boride layer that provides oxidation protection and acts as an active mass. An intermetallic reaction occurs between aluminum and nickel. Aluminum based nanoparticles were used for the examples, but the principle is applicable to other materials as well.

Patent History

Patent number: 10421695
Type: Grant
Filed: Jul 20, 2015
Date of Patent: Sep 24, 2019
Assignee: NEI Corporation (Somerset, NJ)
Inventors: Mohit Jain (East Brunswick, NJ), Biju Mathew (Monroe, NJ)
Primary Examiner: Robert S Cabral
Application Number: 14/803,673

View / Download Full Patent (pdf) ⇓


About NEI Corporation

Founded in 1997, NEI Corporation is an application driven company that utilizes nanotechnology to develop and produce advanced materials. The company’s core competencies are in synthesizing nanoscale materials and prototyping products that incorporate advanced materials to create significant performance improvements in manufactured goods. NEI’s products include advanced protective coatings, high performance battery electrode materials, and specialty nanoscale materials for diverse applications. NEI’s state-of-the-art manufacturing and testing facility includes high temperature furnaces with controlled atmospheres, mixing, blending and drying equipment, coaters, particle characterization instruments, corrosion testing equipment, polymer films & coatings characterization, and a Li-ion battery testing laboratory. Learn more »

For more information, give us a call or email us.

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NEI Announces Allowance of Two New Patents to Its Portfolio of Functional Coatings

February 7, 2017

Somerset, NJ (USA) – NEI Corporation announced today that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has recently issued a notice of allowance to the company on two patent applications; one for a durable highly hydrophobic coating and the other for an adhesion promoting surface treatment. These patents complement NEI’s portfolio of patents pertaining to superhydrophobic, self-healing, and abrasion resistant coatings. With the allowance of seven patents, and the introduction of an array of coating products, NEI’s concerted efforts to develop and implement practical, multi-functional coatings have now come to fruition.

There is great interest in functional coatings, for both industrial and consumer applications, where the coating or surface treatment provides functionalities beyond the usual protective and aesthetic properties. For example, self-healing coatings autonomously repair damage, hydrophobic coatings are able to vigorously repel water droplets, oleophobic coatings prevent “oil” molecules from sticking to the surface, self-cleaning or easy-to-clean coatings minimize or eliminate the need for chemicals during washing, and adhesion promoter surface treatments enable an ultra-strong bond between the primer and the surface. Commercial products to date have met with limited success because they are not engineered to meet all of the functional performance requirements that an application requires. NEI’s patented and patent-pending technologies address this market need.

The recently allowed patent application describes durable hydrophobic coating compositions that are highly desirable for numerous applications, as they impart easy-to-clean and stain-resisting properties to surfaces. For aesthetic reasons, there is also a need for a thin, transparent, easy-to-clean coating that does not add excess weight and does not change the appearance of the substrate to be coated. The patented compositions are comprised of functionalized perfluoropolyethers (PFPEs), which are known for their non-stick and lubricating properties. It has been a major technical challenge to incorporate PFPEs into a stable formulation that can lead to a coating with sufficient adhesion to various substrates. The patent claims transparent and homogeneous compositions that overcome the stability and adhesion issues. The compositions result in a micron-thick, durable hydrophobic coating that cannot easily be removed by abrasion, harsh cleaners, or chemicals. The patent is the basis for NEI’s hydrophobic coating products, NANOMYTE® SuperCN and SR-100EC.

The adhesion promoter patent application describes a chromate-free, surface pretreatment composition. The environmentally-friendly, waterborne pretreatment promotes the adhesion between a metal substrate and an overlying paint layer by acting as a “double‐sided bonding agent,” while at the same time improving corrosion resistance. The novel composition comprises organo-functional silanes but functions differently from traditional silane treatments. The composition results in a thin film coating having a graded structure, i.e., an inorganic oxide layer that bonds strongly with steel and a loosely crosslinked top layer containing functional groups that can further crosslink with paint overlay. The new technology is valuable to applicators who paint metal structures, such as bridges, ships, and other steel structures. It is also applicable to industrial painting operations, such as coil and spray coatings. The patented chromate‐free pretreatment for steel, offered commercially as NANOMYTE® PT-20, represents a significant advancement in the state‐of‐the‐art for corrosion resistant technologies.

For a more detailed discussion on the company’s patented coating technologies and applications, please see our Patented Coating Technologies Brief.

Download Press Release (pdf) »

For more information, contact us:
NEI Corporation
+1 (732) 868-3141
Send us a message
###


About NEI Corporation

NEI Corporation is an application-driven company that utilizes nanotechnology to develop and produce advanced materials. The company’s core competencies are in synthesizing nanoscale materials and prototyping products that incorporate the advanced materials. NEI offers an array of Advanced Protective Coatings for metal and polymer surfaces, which are sold under the registered trademark NANOMYTE® and are backed by a suite of issued and pending patents. The coatings have tailored functionalities such as anti-corrosion, self-healing, scratch resistance, ice-phobic, and self-cleaning.

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NEI Patented Coatings Technology Brief

NEI Corporation’s Patented Technologies Provide a New Perspective on Coatings and Surface Treatment

Gains in productivity and efficiency are possible when a coating or surface treatment provides functionalities beyond the usual protective and aesthetic properties. This realization has sparked great interest in functional coatings in recent years for applications that traditionally have not used paints or coatings. A good example is the use of anti-ice coatings on power transmission lines. Mitigating ice accumulation will help prevent power outages, which has a tangible and beneficial economic impact. Another example is the use of a surface treatment to increase the efficiency of power generation turbines.

Examples of functionalities of interest for both industrial and consumer applications include:

  • Self-Healing: the coating or surface treatment autonomously repairs damage
  • Hydrophobicity: coated surfaces vigorously repel water droplets
  • Oleophobicity: prevents “oil” molecules from sticking to the surface
  • Self-Cleaning / Easy-To-Clean: minimizes or eliminates the need for chemicals during washing
  • Adhesion Enhancement: promotes ultra-strong bond between the coating and the surface

While great strides have been made in academic circles to understand the different surface phenomena of these so called ‘smart coatings’, commercial products to date have met with limited success because they are not engineered to meet all of the functional performance requirements that an application may need. For example, commercially available superhydrophobic coatings repel water droplets, but do not prevent the diffusion of water vapor – minimizing moisture ingress is a critical functionality for most protective coatings.

More often than not, many of the functionalities mentioned above need to be integrated into a single coating or surface treatment. For example, a transparent coating that resists finger printing also needs to be scratch resistant and durable. A coating that prevents fogging in eyewear and other transparent surfaces must also be durable and resistant to chemicals. Further, in order to meet the cost criteria, application of the coating must be compatible with conventional coating methods such as spray, dip, brush or flow. Over the past few years, NEI Corporation’s concerted efforts to develop and implement practical, multi-functional coatings are now coming to fruition.

Backed by a bevy of issued and pending patents, NEI has introduced an array of coating products under the registered trade name NANOMYTE®. For example, NANOMYTE® MEND is based on US Patent 8,987,352, where a thermally induced, physical self-healing phenomenon leads to gap closing and crack sealing. The self-healing coating involves a unique phase-separated morphology that facilitates the delivery of the self-healing agent to the damage site (such as a scratch or crack) thereby restoring the coating appearance & function. Utilizing commonly available polymer materials and nanoparticles arranged in a unique morphology to achieve self-healing, MEND offers a practical self-healing solution to common polymer coating systems. In response to the need for waterborne, self-healing coatings for non-metallic substrates, NEI developed a waterborne, polyurethane-based, self-healing coating. NANOMYTE® MEND for wood (US Patent 8,664,298) specifically targets the wood cabinet market. A more recent patent-pending version of MEND, referred to as MEND-RT, allows self-healing at near ambient temperature. It is used as the inter-layer of a coating stack and has been shown to enhance the corrosion resistance of traditional coating systems. The MEND coating platform is based on polyurethane, but the principle can be applied to other coating systems as well.

Self-healing principles can also be applied to surface treatments of metals, whereby the pretreatments can mimic the performance of chromate conversion coatings. To this end, NEI has developed a series of pretreatments for different metals where a chemical self-healing mechanism imparts corrosion resistance. For example, NANOMYTE® PT-60 is a patent-pending conversion coating for use on magnesium alloys. The nanoscale structure of the surface allows ions to diffuse to the damage site, forming a barrier that prevents further corrosion. In addition, PT-60 has been engineered to act as a tie layer that bonds the overlying primer with the metal, thereby leading to excellent performance in the field. Similarly, NEI’s NANOMYTE® PT-10M provides self-healing protection for aluminum, while patent-pending PT-20 is designed for use on steel, and PT-30 (US Patent 8,741,074) is used on copper alloys.

As previously mentioned, combining multiple functionalities in a coating, such as self-healing and superhydrophobicity, presents new opportunities not available until now. For example, NEI has been issued a patent (US Patent 8,968,459) for a superhydrophobic coating composition that also has a self-healing function similar to that of plant leaves. This self-healing, superhydrophobic coating mimics lotus leaves, which maintain their superhydrophobicity by repairing the damaged surface layer with a continuously-secreting hydrophobic epicuticular wax. Equipped with the ability to repair or renew itself, the novel NEI coating overcomes the durability problem of traditional superhydrophobic coatings.

Durable hydrophobic coatings are highly desirable for numerous applications as they usually impart easy-to-clean and stain-resisting properties to surfaces. For aesthetic reasons, there is also a need for a thin, transparent, easy-to-clean coating that does not add excess weight and does not change the appearance of the substrate to be coated. Further desirable properties of such coatings include a high degree of scratch/abrasion resistance, excellent adhesion, and chemical resistance, all of which are critical in maintaining a durable coating. In addressing these needs, NEI’s recently developed NANOMYTE® SuperCN and SR-100EC products are patent-pending transparent coatings with a unique combination of properties, including easy-to-clean and stain-resisting properties, excellent abrasion/scratch resistance, as well as good adhesion with a variety of substrates – including polymers, metals, and ceramics.

Scratch resistance is a sought-after property for coatings in a variety of applications, such as ophthalmic and sports-wear lenses, automobile and airplane windows. Plastic substrates, such as polycarbonate and acrylic, can scratch easily and lose transparency quickly during daily use and maintenance. Hard and optically transparent coatings for plastic substrates possess a significant market potential. NEI offers a patented (US Patent 9,006,370) transparent, scratch-resistant coating called NANOMYTE® SR-100, which exhibits significantly better abrasion resistance than commercially available, scratch-resistant coating products. A matte version of SR-100 has also been developed and is now commercially available.

Adhesion enhancement is usually achieved by using adhesion promoters and surface treatment techniques. A recently allowed NEI patent application on adhesion promoter describes a surface pretreatment composition that is chromate‐free. The environmentally-friendly, waterborne pretreatment promotes adhesion between the metal substrate and overlying paint layer by acting as a “double‐sided bonding agent,” while at the same time improving corrosion resistance. The novel composition comprises organo-functional silanes but functions differently from traditional silane treatment. The composition results in a thin film coating having a graded structure, i.e., an inorganic oxide layer that bonds strongly with steel and a loosely crosslinked top layer containing functional groups that can further crosslink with paint overlay. The new technology has value to applicators who paint metal structures, such as bridges, ships, and other steel structures. It is also applicable to industrial painting operations such as coil and spray coatings. The patented chromate‐free pretreatment for steel, offered commercially as NANOMYTE® PT-20, represents a significant advancement in the state‐of‐the‐art for corrosion resistant technologies.

About NEI Corporation:
NEI is an application driven company that manufactures and sells Advanced Materials products, provides materials development services, and performs contract-based R&D for public and private entities. NEI’s products, which are sold under the registered trademark NANOMYTE®, are backed by a suite of issued and pending patents. NEI has built a strong manufacturing and R&D infrastructure that enables rapid transition of concepts to products. The company has a 10,000 square foot, state-of-the-art materials manufacturing and testing facility in Somerset, New Jersey, which includes high temperature furnaces with controlled atmospheres, mixing, blending and drying equipment, coaters, particle characterization instruments, corrosion testing equipment, polymer films & coatings characterization, and a Li-ion battery testing laboratory. Since its inception, NEI has partnered with small companies, large multinational corporations, U.S. Defense Laboratories, U.S. National Laboratories, and Universities. The relationships take on different forms, ranging from a strategic partnership to joint development efforts targeted at specific applications.

For more information, contact us at : +1 (732) 868‐3141 or sales@neicorporation.com

View / Download in PDF

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NEI Announces the Issuance of Multiple Patents on Self-Healing & Superhydrophobic Coatings


June 23, 2015

Somerset, New Jersey (USA) – NEI Corporation announced today that the US Patent and Trademark Office has issued patents to the company on self-healing, superhydrophobic, and abrasion resistant coatings. With the allowance of five patents and the introduction of an array of coating products, NEI’s concerted efforts to develop and implement practical, multi-functional coatings are now coming to fruition.

There is great interest in functional coatings, for both industrial and consumer applications, when the coating or surface treatment provides functionalities beyond the usual protective and aesthetic properties. For example, self-healing coatings autonomously repair damage, hydrophobic coatings are able to vigorously repel water droplets, oleophobic coatings prevent “oil” molecules from sticking to the surface, and self-cleaning or easy-to-clean coatings minimize or eliminate the need for chemicals during washing. Commercial products to date have met with limited success because they are not engineered to meet all of the functional performance requirements that an application may need. NEI’s patented and patent-pending technologies address this market need.

In the recent past, NEI has introduced several coatings under the registered trade name NANOMYTE®. For example, NANOMYTE® MEND is based on US Patent 8,987,352, where a thermally induced physical self-healing phenomenon leads to gap closing and crack sealing. The self-healing coating involves a unique phase-separated morphology that facilitates the delivery of the self-healing agent to the damage site (such as a scratch or crack) thereby restoring the coating appearance & function. In response to the need for waterborne, self-healing coatings for non-metallic substrates, NEI has developed a waterborne, polyurethane-based, self-healing coating (US Patent 8,664,298). A more recent patent-pending version of MEND, referred to as MEND-RT, allows self-healing at near ambient temperature. It is used as the inter-layer of a coating stack and has been shown to enhance the corrosion resistance of traditional coating systems. The MEND coating platform is based on polyurethane, but the principle can be applied to other coating systems as well.

Self-healing principles can also be applied to surface treatments of metals, whereby the pretreatments can mimic the performance of chromate conversion coatings. To this end, NEI has developed a series of pretreatments for different metals where a chemical self-healing mechanism imparts corrosion resistance. For example, NANOMYTE® PT-60 is a patent-pending conversion coating for use on magnesium alloys. The nanoscale structure of the surface allows ions to diffuse to the damage site, forming a barrier that prevents further corrosion. In addition, PT-60 has been engineered to act as a tie layer that bonds the overlying primer with the metal, resulting in excellent field performance. Similarly, NEI’s NANOMYTE® PT-10M provides self-healing protection for aluminum, while patent-pending PT-20 is designed for use on steel, and PT-30 (US Patent 8,741,074) is used on copper alloys.

As previously mentioned, combining multiple functionalities in a coating, such as self-healing and superhydrophobicity, presents new opportunities not available until now. For example, NEI has been issued a patent (US Patent 8,968,459) for a superhydrophobic coating composition that also has a self-healing function similar to that of plant leaves. This self-healing, superhydrophobic coating mimics lotus leaves, which maintain their superhydrophobicity by repairing the damaged surface layer with a continuously-secreting hydrophobic epicuticular wax. Equipped with the ability to repair or renew itself, the novel NEI coating overcomes the durability problem of traditional superhydrophobic coatings. Most recently, NEI was awarded a patent for a transparent and scratch resistant coating (US Patent 9,006,370) for use on plastic substrates, including polycarbonate and acrylic. NANOMYTE® SR-100 is a hardcoat that exhibits significantly better abrasion resistance than commercially available scratch resistant coating products. Scratch resistance is a sought-after property for coatings in a variety of applications, such as 3-D printed objects, ophthalmic and sports-wear lenses, automobile and airplane windows.

For a more detailed discussion on the company’s patented coating technologies and applications, please see our Patented Coating Technologies Brief.


About NEI Corporation:

NEI Corporation is an application driven company that manufactures and sells Advanced Materials products, provides materials development services, and performs contract-based R&D for public and private entities. NEI’s products, which are sold under the registered trademark NANOMYTE®, are backed by a suite of issued and pending patents. NEI has built a strong manufacturing and R&D infrastructure that enables rapid transition of concepts to products. The company has a 10,000 square foot, state-of-the-art materials manufacturing and testing facility in Somerset, New Jersey, equipped with high temperature furnaces with controlled atmospheres, mixing, blending and drying equipment, coaters, particle characterization instruments, corrosion testing equipment, polymer films & coatings characterization, and a Li-ion battery testing laboratory. Since its inception, NEI has partnered with small companies, large multinational corporations, U.S. Defense Laboratories, U.S. National Laboratories, and Universities. The relationships take on different forms, ranging from a strategic partnership to joint development efforts targeted at specific applications.

For more information, contact:
Ms. Krista Martin
+1 (732) 868‐3141
sales@neicorporation.com
###

View / Download Press Release (pdf)