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Chemist sells plastic recycling
technology
By Anna Herkamp
Summer
Reporter
Like many professors who have co-founded companies
in Purdue's Research Park, professor of chemistry Dor Ben-Amotz has
successfully distributed the information about his newest research in
spectroscopy.
What may be a little more unusual is that companies
as big as Ford Motor Company have purchased the technology developed
by his company, SpectraCode.
Ben-Amotz began his career with post-doctoral work.
While he was working for the Exxon corporate research lab, he was encouraged
to try and patent some new discoveries he was making in the field of
viscosity, or thickness of oil products.
He refused to give in to the pressure to come up
with something that could have fiscal value. He insisted that the work
he was doing was for research academic purposes only, and not for practical
use.
Years later, after he joined the staff at Purdue,
with no pressure to come up with new ideas for industrial value, Ben-Amotz
did just that: he began to get ideas for the practical uses of his research.
Recently, SpectraCode got a big boost from Ford
when they purchased the technology using lasers to sense specific types
of plastic.
This technology was not made for the use of automobile
manufacturing, however. Originally, the research was designed to solve
a problem involving plastic recycling. Using ramen spectroscopy, light
can be shined onto a plastic product and by seeing how the light reflects
off of it, the type of plastic it is can be determined and then sorted.
A company in Japan has recently began collaborating
with SpectraCode to further develop the technology.
According to Yanan Jiang, president of SpectraCode,
one of the bigger projects the company is working on is figuring out
how to make black plastic, which melts faster under a laser, usable
with the signal.
SpectraCode currently holds patents for the spectroscopy
research. Though the company has to hold these patents for the success
of its business, Ben-Amotz says he doesn't pursue patents personally.
"I should publish for everybody," he says. As Purdue
is an institution funded by the government, the research should benefit
all the taxpayers that contribute to it, he said. "I don't see a lot
of need to spend time and money trying to tie up my research in patents."
Professor Ben-Amotz is also working in collaboration
with professor Philip S. Low, professor David Thompson and graduate
students Karim Jallad, Dongmao Zhang and Michael Kennedy to develop
some pharmaceutical applications for their research.
The medical research involves cancer imaging by
selectively targeting cancer cells and using optical therapies to kill
them.
Ben-Amotz said his interest in spectroscopy began
from childhood when he had a strong interest in art. "Back then, people
who knew me would have said I might have become an artist," he said.
He said his scientific interests developed later. "I always liked math
too," he said. But because of his interest in art, it led him into the
specific fields of light study. "Spectroscopy combines everything; it
keeps me interested," he said.
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ext. 253
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