Company receives fluoropolymer award

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Feb 26, 2007

Varioptic's award winning Arctic Liquid Lens is a miniature auto-focus lens for mobile camera phones, webcams and barcode readers.

Varioptic has won first prize in the Europe, Middle East and Africa section of the DuPont Plunkett Awards 2006 for innovation in fluoropolymers.

The French company's Arctic Liquid Lens is a miniature auto-focus lens for mobile camera phones, webcams and barcode readers, which incorporates a gasket of DuPont Teflon PTFE to maintain an essential air- and liquid-tight seal.

Second prize was awarded to ElringKlinger Kunststofftechnik of Germany for its development of a new, spiral-shaped solid propellant with Teflon PTFE, which is used to power thrusters designed to maintain communications satellites in a precise orbit.

The first prise of US $5000 and a glass sculpture was presented to Jean-Christophe Robert, Chief Technical Officer, Varioptic, during an industry event in Gstaad, Switzerland, on 21 January, 2007.

Dr Michael Schlipf, Research And Development Manager at ElringKlinger Kunststofftechnik received the second prize of US $3000 and a glass sculpture on behalf of his company.

This was the tenth DuPont Plunkett Awards competition, first held in 1988 to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery of Teflon PTFE fluoropolymer resin by DuPont scientist Dr RoyPlunkett.

Varioptic's liquid-filled optical lenses offer very rapid and accurate auto-focus without mechanical moving parts, resulting in a very reliable and inexpensive product that can also be miniaturised.

The development was made possible by the company's electrowetting technology, a novel development where two isodensity liquids, contained within the lens, change curvature and focal length in response to a varying voltage.

Teflon PTFE was chosen for the special gasket which seals the lens because its water-repelling hydrophobicity enhances the electrowetting action and the tightness of the seal.

The company is now developing a coating of Teflon AF as a di-electric layer for its next generation of liquid lenses.

ElringKlinger's solid propellant with Teflon PTFE combines the benefits of solid and liquid chemical propellants to maintain satellites in orbit in the correct position over a long time, thus significantly extending their overall lifetime and function.

Designed with the help of the Institute for Space Systems (IRS) at Stuttgart University, the new propellant offers a superior exhaust velocity of 12000m/s, which is 10 times faster than conventional chemical systems.

At the same time the new technology combines the highest efficiency with the lowest propellant consumption for longer-term satellite manoeuvrability.

As a comparison, a conventional chemical thruster would need about three times more propellant compared to the new Teflon PTFE propellant used for the I-MPD-thruster.

The first satellites to use the new positioning system are expected to be launched in 2008-2009.

The judging panel for the DuPont Plunkett Awards 2006 comprised Werner Goetz, Chief Editor of a German multi-technical industry journal Industrie-Anzeiger; Klaus Kimpel, fluoropolymer industry specialist and consultant based in Switzerland, and Long Lu, a Chinese scientist specialising in organic fluorine chemistry and former winner of the Young Chemist Award of the Chinese Chemical Society.