Technologies
The founders and engineers at PolyK are world leaders in polymer dielectric materials for high voltage applications and we have invested over $30M US dollars in developing technologies related to high voltage dielectric and piezoelectric materials and applications. While there are many great scientists who are good at polymer chemistry or material physics, the PolyK team has accumulated invaluable understanding on how these materials are used in practical applications (high energy density capacitors, advanced soft actuators, piezo sensors, ultrasound transducers, etc) and how they are manufactured in commercial scale (polymer synthesis, dielectric/capacitor film production, piezo film and sensor production) from previous experience in commercializing these high performance materials. These true understanding of the electrical applications and manufacturing (in addition to our in-depth knowhow on material development) provides us the critical leading edges that we can make the best material choice from the standpoint of applications and cost.
Over the past decades, the founders have been pioneered on several dielectric and ferroelectric materials:
1. PVDF, P(VDF-HFP), P(VDF-CTFE), P(VDF-TFE), P(VDF-TrFE) copolymers and ferroelectric polymers, P(VDF-TrFE-CFE) and P(VDF-TrFE-CTFE) relaxor ferroelectric polymers [electroactive polymers EAP] with dielectric constant higher than 50 at room temperature (without any fillers). In-depth understand the polymer compositions - processing- morphology - performance relationship. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150307673A1/en
2. Production of these special PVDF-based high dielectric constant polymers.
3. Ultrathin film production using either solvent casting or extrusion - biaxial orientation. Large rolls of film with thickness of 2 um have been produced.
4. Electroactive polymer (EAP) or electromechanical polymer (EMP) that generates giant dimensional change under electric field (artificial muscle, robot, etc). Design and fabrication the EAP actuators. Use of EAP actuators in medical devices, haptics, or braille display, etc.
5. High temperature polymers for film capacitor applications: composition selection, performance valuation, feasibility of ultrathin film production (
6. Integrated Computational Material Engineering (ICME) modeling to transfer material performance from 1 cm^2 lab-scale film samples to large capacitors >1,000 uF. This guides us to make the best selection of polymer compositions.
Our in-depth understanding is further demonstrated by our commercial products in test instruments in high voltage dielectric, ferroelectric, and piezoelectric technologies. Even originally trained as polymer chemists/engineers, we also understand the fundamental electrical engineering, physics, and applications and we successfully developed these special test instruments which are now used by over 100 customers around the world in developing high energy density film capacitors, novel dielectric materials, advanced piezo sensors and ultrasound transducers, haptics actuators, etc.
In addition, the team has the invaluable experience in polymer film manufacturing and cost analysis of materials and manufacturing. We provide customer solutions not only based on material technical performance, but also based on system or component-level cost and performance analysis. Many times, the issue can be solved at the component or system-level, rather than switching to an expensive new material.