Purdue’s Trask Innovation Fund has committed $50,000 each to short-term research projects into sodium-ion batteries and a handheld plant scanner, in addition to $21,000 for a data security project.
Purdue University announced Wednesday that it had invested a total of $121,000 from its Trask Innovation Fund in three research projects, targeting the commercialisation of energy storage, crop health and health-orientated data security applications.
Trask Innovation Fund is managed by Purdue’s tech transfer affiliate, Purdue Research Foundation (PRF), to help short-term projects based on innovation disclosures to the PRF’s Office of Technology Commercialisation (OTC).
The investments include $50,000 for a project attempting to devise sodium-ion batteries that use cheap sodium metals rather than the valuable lithium found in most conventional batteries today.
Vilas Pol, an associate professor in Purdue’s Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, is leading the project and will aim to overcome technical barriers including a tendency for sodium ions to adhere to the battery anode during initial charging cycles.
Another $50,000 has been invested in a handheld scanning sensor for plants that exploits hyperspectral-imaging…
