ABOUT SRT

StormRider Technologies, Inc [SRTI], is an advanced materials and applications development company, developing new technologies for surface and bulk modification to achieve specific properties.   SRTI was founded in 2007 to develop advanced materials applications for medical, defense, homeland security, and consumer applications based on synthetic coatings and nanotechnologies.  We are particularly skilled at matching customer-end user requirements to designed materials.  Contact us about your application.

SRTI has worked in plasma based microelectronic, medical device and photovoltaic commercial applications of surface modifications and selected defense and homeland security applications.  SRTI is based at the Clemson University Advanced Materials Center in Anderson, SC, and operates both laboratory and pilot scale facilities.

The process chemistries are very flexible and can produce surface bonded polymers with acidic, basic or reactive organic functional groups for subsequent bonding other polymers or other functional materials.

MATERIALS AND CHEMICALS.  The company and its members have extensive experience in designing chemical and polymeric and composite materials for successful commercial application.  This includes molecular design, process design, pilot and scale-up operations, up to manufacturing startup.  Particular industries include pharmaceutical, agrochem, photographics, semiconductor and defense applications.  Contact us about your application.

STRUCTURAL AND BARRIER COATINGS.  Particular interest has centered in the following areas where conformality, high throughput and reasonable cost are primary drivers.

• Strength and abrasion coatings for industrial goods.  Ceramic coatings have long been applied to industrial parts to improve impact strength, abrasion resistance and corrosion resistance.  The StormRider plasma process provides a rapid low cost method for applying these coatings.  Examples include Titanium Oxide coatings for glass objects, Silicon Oxide coatings for corrosion resistant rotor blades and aircraft parts.

• Hydrocarbon barrier coatings.  New regulations for emissions from small engine fuel tanks have led to several high volume opportunities.  These tanks are used in outdoor power equipment, all-terrain vehicles and similar products.  Polyethylene blow molded tanks are usually used for these applications.  The untreated tanks have inherent permeability to hydrocarbon fluids. Existing technology of Gaseous Fluorination of the tank surfaces in large chambers has come under recent criticism for facility emissions issues, and multilayer polymer co-extrusion suffers from high initial capital costs in the several million dollars per machine center.

• Moisture barrier coatings.  Barrier coatings for medical devices, circuit boards, lighting devices, displays, consumer electronic devices, avionics devices are all of interest.  In these cases we have expanded the range of monomers from functional compounds to include a group of readily available structural materials from ceramics to simple olefins to fluoro-olefins.  These materials offer a very wide range of physical, chemical and optical properties and are well known polymers from bulk polymerization processes.

FUNCTIONAL, DESIGNED and CATALYTIC COATINGS.  Application specific designed coatings enable product differentiation and drive end user improvements in many areas:

• Catalytic functional coatings.   Barrier coatings that provide catalytic self-cleaning and barrier properties are interesting in a variety of applications.  The photocatalytic properties of TiO2 layers on windows leading to photodecomposition of surface contaminants has been widely reported.  We have coated TiOx structures on a variety of substrates using our plasma methods.  Further, we have interest in exploring some organic catalytic materials as self cleaning agents on surfaces.

• Designed functional surfaces.  Much of our prior work has focused on functional coatings for pH, chemical binding, lubricious surfaces and enhanced surface specific abrasion and grinding. The methods are dry-in/dry-out, rapid and effective on polymer substrates, and include acrylic, vinyl and ceramic coatings.