Houston company raises $5.8M to create cleaner chemical reactor

[Elderberry]

Houston Chronicle by Andrea Leinfelder Aug. 23, 2019

Houston-based Syzygy Plasmonics has raised $5.8 million for its technology to create an environmentally friendly chemical reactor that could, one day, replace those used at refineries and chemical plants.

“This reactor is fundamentally different,” CEO Trevor Best said. “It's super science.”

Chemical reactors are the containers in which chemicals get combined and turned into new products. Most chemical reactors do this at very high temperatures and pressure levels. Syzygy uses LED lights.

Hydrogen is the first element that Syzygy will seek to make in large quantities. Traditionally, this has required burning natural gas to heat water and methane to a temperature of about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The reactor is also pressurized to about 500 psi, or pounds of force per square inch of area.

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/techburger/article/Houston-company-raises-5-8M-to-create-cleaner-14372084.php

[Elderberry]

http://plasmonics.tech/technology

“Antenna-Reactor” Plasmonic Photocatalyst

Licensed from Rice University, this is the world’s highest performance photocatalyst. It has been published in leading academic journals such as Science, Nature, and PNAS. Our catalyst is a platform technology and it has been demonstrated on many different chemical reactions.


The Antenna-Reactor is the combination of a larger
light-harvesting plasmonic nanoparticle (the ‘Antenna’),
and smaller traditional catalyst nanoparticles (the ‘Reactor’).


It offers unprecedented performance. Shown here are the
results for ammonia decomposition. This was published in
Science Magazine - 05 Oct 2018: Vol. 362, Issue 6410,
pp. 69-72

Photocatalytic Reactor

The catalyst is important, but our proprietary reactor design is what makes it work. The development of our reactor incorporates expertise from chemical engineering, optics, materials science, theoretical physics, and nanophotonics.