Picosun Enables Novel Catalysts

Espoo Finland /PRNewswire/ - Picosun Oy, the leading manufacturer of high quality Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) equipment, extends its solution portfolio into functional ALD coatings for novel, ecological catalyst materials.

The now developed novel catalysts are aimed to significantly reduce costs and process waste generation of chemical manufacturing. Potentially, this can lead to several hundreds of millions of euros economic impact, giving a substantial boost to the competitive edge and sustainability of European chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

Picosun's ALD technology enables optimized deposition of catalytically active metals on simple, cost-efficient supports such as metal oxide or polymer powders, thus realizing highly efficient catalytic function with only a fraction of cost compared to traditional catalyst technologies. As a tightly contained and controlled gas-phase process, ALD also eliminates the risks of typical wet chemistry methods such as leaks, environmental contamination, and material waste.

"The now developed catalyst technology on powder substrates is an invaluable addition to our extensive ALD solution portfolio. There is a significant market for Picosun's ALD expertise in the field of chemical and pharmaceuticals manufacturing. In addition to these industries, our optimized powder coating methods can outperform current solutions for example in the automotive industries and in the next generation lithium ion thin film battery manufacturing," summarizes Juhana Kostamo, Managing Director of Picosun.

The development work for ALD-enabled catalyst manufacturing was realized within the frame of European Union 7thFramework project POLYCAT ("Modern polymer-based catalysts and microflow conditions as key elements of innovations in fine chemical synthesis"), running from October 2010 to April 2014.

Picosun's leading ALD thin film technology enables the industrial leap into the future by novel, cutting-edge coating solutions, with four decades of continuous, groundbreaking expertise in the field. Today, PICOSUN™ ALD systems are in daily production use in numerous prominent industries around the globe. Picosun is based in Finland, with subsidiaries in USA, China andSingapore, and a world-wide sales and support network.