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Profs and
Profits
In a clear example of how university research can spawn new business ideas, a safer dry cleaning process developed jointly by the chemistry department of UNC-Chapel Hill and the chemical engineering department of N.C.State is helping a growing franchise called Hanger's clean up in Wilmington and other places. The breakthrough is spurring both schools to strengthen their partnership in hopes of marketing other environmentally-friendly technologies. Joe DeSimone, the Chapel Hill professor who discovered a carbon dioxide (CO2) compound which many expect will revolutionize dry cleaning and other industrial processes, this month becomes the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering — the first endowed chair to span both Carolina and State. DeSimone attracted widespread attention when a carbon dioxide compound he invented was honored by Congress and received the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award. The company he founded to commercialize the product, Micell Technologies, was listed by R&D 100 as one of the most important processes developed in 1998. DeSimone previously held a joint professorship at both universities as co-director of the Kenan Center for Utilization of CO2 in Manufacturing, Ed Samulski, head of Carolina's chemistry department, said DeSimone's elevation is a sign that the universities are committed to fostering business innovations. “It's an affirmation that people are beginning to understand that we have to learn to work together in a more cooperative manner these days just because of the nature of the problems we're working on,” he said. “You need people who appreciate molecules as well as those who appreciate what happens in a more complex system. Grad students who work in Joe's research groups are exposed to a different kind of education. They see both the molecular scale and the macroscopic, practical scale.” Teams of engineers and chemists work together at the center DeSimone will head, and each of 16 member companies will contribute $35,000 annually, all working together to study possibilities of using carbon dioxide as a solvent in a wide variety of applications. “This is one of the few examples of chemists and engineers working together in academia to solve real problems. It gives all of our students a flavor for real life applications,” said Ruben Carbonell, head of the chemical engineering department at State and co-director of the Kenan Center for Utilization of CO2 in Manufacturing. Real life applications for the use of CO2 in dry cleaning and fabric coating leaped forward in 1996 soon after DeSimone presented his findings at a board retreat of the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science. Bill Kretzer, the recently deceased CEO of Unifi, had, at the time, been working with the College of Textiles at State to develop CO2 applications for dying polyester yarn. Kenan Institute Director Hal Hopfenberg had encouraged Unifi senior vice president Ken Huggins to look into DeSimone's applications. “Bill just happened to go to that retreat where Joe was the featured speaker,” Huggins said. “It was pure serendipity.” DeSimone and his team were invited to visit Unifi the next week. “They saw that we held a portfolio of technology that would revolutionalize the dry cleaning industry and they shared our vision,” DeSimone said. “Unifi became our first funder and Micell Technologies was formed in the last quarter of 1996.” Unifi also connected Micell with the George Soros Management Fund, which provided additional funding. “We liked the technology base of this company and the intellectual property they had garnished to use it in cleaning fabrics, metals and clothing,” Huggins said. “We realized that if they had this surfactant know-how to make things soluble in liquid CO2, there was a probability that this would be synergistic with our own dyeing research. It might improve the dyeing process that we had already developed.” Unifi has also invested in a prototype machine which should be in use on site by the end of this year to take the technology from lab to industrial use. Huggins began his relationship with Micell by serving as Unifi's hands-on advisor to the company, and later became chief executive until Kirk Kinsell was hired as a permanent CEO in May. Since Unifi owns 40 percent of Micell, he remains very involved with both companies. “In May of 1998, we had what we thought was a terrific process and patents pending on a lot of our work,” Huggins said. “We promised that we would have a commercial machine and a commercial process in 1998. In Thanksgiving of 1998, we placed the first machine into Hanger's in Wilmington. It was a tremendously challenging year. We had to pull the machine together and supply the consumer with service equal to or better than what they were used to.” At first, Micell's focus was primarily environmental, with an eye toward matching or meeting traditional cleaning systems in an environmentally friendly way. “As our process has evolved, we've found a host of other benefits to the system such as less heat and color damage, no residual odors and minimized shrinkage,” Huggins said. In addition to the Wilmington stores, DeSimone said two other machines have been shipped to Rhode Island; and another is running in Lansing, Ill. A Triangle-based Hangers scheduled to open in Morrisville will serve as an operating plant as well as a training facility. DeSimone's decision to enter the business world — along with two students, Jim McClain and Tim Romack, who helped discover the technology and write the business plan — was not made lightly. He still considers himself a chemist first but one with a deep appreciation of chemical engineers. To DeSimone, what's most important is to continue to develop new technologies in partnership with industry. An example of that is his work with DuPont, which is not involved with Micell but has an agreement with UNC to license the technology to use CO2 as a solvent to make Teflon®. DuPont is in the process of building a $40 million pilot facility in Fayetteville to evaluate the commercial viability of a technology that has been tested for six years in UNC labs to make different grades of Teflon® polymers for computer network wire coatings. “This could be a very interesting development, if it pans out,” said DuPont scientist Everett Baucom. “We're always looking for ways to make better products and make them less expensively. If this technology works, that's what we'll do with the simpler process and fewer steps. “I've been involved with DeSimone on this for more than five years. I went to UNC, so I'm very excited about the possibility of using technology developed at UNC to create jobs within the state of North Carolina.” Hopfenberg, who was instrumental in connecting DeSimone with Unifi and UNC with NCSU, describes DeSimone's contribution as larger than Micell. “If I made a contribution to any of this,” he said, “it was recognizing the talents of Joe DeSimone and the contribution he had to make 10 years ago when we first met. Joe was frustrated by the lack of chemical engineering at UNC. I helped orchestrate his co-appointment to the two schools through the joint professorship. When the Kenan professorship was put together to recognize the ongoing need for chemists and chemical engineers to work together, Joe became the first incumbent of that chair.” DeSimone finds himself less frustrated
these days. “In the early 90s,” he said, “I was
thinking about leaving UNC because I needed an engineering
department in order to give my research practical applications in
the real world. UNC has one of top 15 chemistry departments in
the country, but no engineering department. NCSU has the number
one engineering department in the Southeast. That's the way the
state broke it up. The joint professorship was an obvious
connection for me, but it wasn't on the radar screen until Hal
Hopfenberg suggested it.” |
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