Could metamaterials be the answer to both the climate crisis and geopolitical resource wars? Ian Sillett, Director of Frontier Technologies, argues that the path to a sustainable future lies in mastering the manufacture of these engineered materials at scale, and why a new Longitude Prize is needed to lead the charge.
In my nearly 20 years of innovation experience, I have researched, seen, assessed or tried to sell countless technologies, services and ideas. Although many went on to become successful commercial products, only three have stood out as genuinely game-changing, and only one can help to prevent wars and climate change at the same time.
The first innovation was Deep Learning, a form of AI which changed the Machine Vision world in 2010 seemingly overnight. The second was quantum sensing, which I came across around 2013 as a potential new sensor type for aviation security. The third, and the subject of this blog, is meta-materials.
Specifically it was nano-inks made from graphene, which I encountered in a laboratory at the University of Sussex in 2019. It was my job to help the academics sell their research, but this sold itself, and the team was already well funded by an industry backer. The biggest problem they faced seemed to be choosing which industrial challenge to solve first.
The area of focus
Meta-materials are materials designed to have properties that do not exist anywhere in nature. As they are designed to have specific properties, they really can be used for almost anything, although the UK government lists transport, energy and net-zero, aerospace and defence, future telecoms, health and photonics and sensors as sectors of interest.
So when I had the opportunity to consider what the next potential Longitude Prize could be, I immediately thought of the biggest problems that I could, and wondered whether metamaterials could solve them.
Rare earth materials are key to the global transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy and electric propulsion. Nearly all of our electrical systems and consumer gadgets rely on them, yet the supply is dominated by China (69%), the USA (13%), Australia (7.5%) and Myanmar (6.5%). History, and current closure of the Hormuz Strait, has shown us that the concentration of scarce resources such as oil, in a few areas of the World causes global tension, conflict and supply issues. When those supply issues emerge, they in turn can cause global economic shocks forcing millions into poverty. It’s a warning then, that according to the International Energy Forum, the demand for neodymium (just one of the rare earth materials) could exceed supply by 250% in the next four years.
Furthermore, mining these materials is environmentally damaging in itself, through open cast mining, greenhouse gas emissions and the release of toxic chemicals into the surrounding environments.
Meta materials could replace these rare earth metals in our electronics supply chains. Rather than digging them from the ground in a limited number of countries, we could manufacture them at scale, where we need them.
The demand for rare earth materials is growing, the supply is limited. We have maybe five years to solve this challenge.
The Longitude gap
My understanding is that this sector has gone from crawling to walking over the last few decades, with nearly 4,000 patents per year, up from 1,000 before 2010. Last week Samsung announced research on metalenses that could see them integrated into smart phones. The sector now needs help to go from walking to running, and to do that it needs to solve the problem of scale and, specifically, manufacturing metamaterials at scale.
If we use the example of the metalens, manufacturing techniques exist to reduce the cost of production by 1,000 times. Although this is just one reasonably niche application to allow the switching of 2D to 3D displays, and is still expensive compared to incumbents, it shows that it IS possible. Longitude Prizes are supposed to be ambitious. They are supposed to be hard, and difficult. This is certainly all of those things, but as a breakthrough innovation with global reach, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a tremendous opportunity.
The demand for rare earth materials is growing, the supply is limited. We have maybe five years to solve this challenge. A Longitude Prize would raise awareness of this issue and persuade the academic and industrial sector to focus on a challenge that truly matters to the World.
If you are interested in taking this from an idea to reality, we are creating a community of experts to shape and design this future Longitude Prize. If you agree with, or disagree with, everything I’ve written we want to hear from you at Challenge Works. We are running a workshop to discuss this prize idea in June, if you'd like to attend, please register your interest and our team will be in touch.
