Andrii Degeler

Andrii Degeler

Andrii Degeler

Andrii Degeler

Modern chemistry can sometimes produce the most unlikely things, including materials familiar to everyone but with totally new—and useful—properties. A recent example of such a material is "flexiramics," which is being developed by Dutch startup Eurekite at the University of Twente.

As the name suggests, flexiramics is a foldable, tissue-like material that is also fireproof and non-conducting, like most other ceramics. As Eurekite commercializes flexiramics and prepares to take it to market, we decided to pay the startup a visit.

The startup's founding team consists of three people: two international students coming from Spain and Azerbaijan and their academic supervisor. Eurekite CEO Gerard Cadafalch Gazquez, who came to the Netherlands from Barcelona in 2010 to pursue a Master's and then a PhD degree, showed his favorite trick with a sheet of flexiramics:

After being held for a few seconds over an open flame, flexiramics doesn't even get warm. The researchers have yet to figure out what temperature you'd need to actually burn the material; the heat sources in the university lab can only go up to 1,200 degrees Celsius, which wasn't enough to make the "paper tissue" burn or melt after 24 hours of being there.

"The discovery of flexiramics came as a surprise," Gazquez said. "It happens sometimes that you discover something you're not looking for. I took [the samples] out after an experiment and saw it was a flexible material, so my first reaction was—okay, it didn't work. But soon after I realised it didn't burn."

Eurekite's plan is to use the new material to manufacture a flexible ceramic PCB (printed circuit board) for heavy-duty electronics that would combine the flexibility and light weight of a polymer with the thermal and dielectric (electrically insulating) properties of a ceramic. A 10 by 10 cm piece of the material will cost under €1, while the market price of a PCB based on it will be "similar" to those currently used in the industry, Gazquez said.

Eurekite has already filed a patent application for the material and plans to add a few more in the near future. There are other companies on the market that offer flexible ceramic films for electronic uses, but the Dutch team claims to be the only one that is able to make it relatively thick.

"We are capable of varying the thicknesses of our material," Gazquez said. "We go from a few micrometers to over a millimetre."

Startup conversion

One of the main challenges the team is facing is the switch from being a research group in the university (which owns a stake in the company) to building a startup that has to stay afloat on the market.

"Becoming a startup has changed a lot," Gazquez said. "We're now renting an office from the university and paying for the space. I had to learn about management, business development, etc."

"Now we also have to look at our own finances," he added. "Managing a team is also very different, compared to just supervising master students working on projects."

The company was officially launched in August 2015, and Gazquez is currently in talks with "rather big players" about using the invention in various products.

Listing image by Andrii Degeler