Orion Crest, Series_1

Chapter 176: Milestones

　　During this time, Orion has been keeping tabs on his peers.

　　On the Arxiv website, there has been an overall upward trend in papers on hybrid composites of hollow carbon spheres and sulphur monomers.

　　Although an innovative idea is not decisively important in the engineering-oriented fields of biology and chemistry, and thus scholars are far less enthusiastic about submitting their papers on Arxiv than in the three directions of pure mathematics, theoretical physics, and computer science, this trend of entries growth still intuitively reflects the direction of the trend in the academic community.

　　Meanwhile, searching through professional academic search engines, it is also obvious that recent results on hollow carbon spheres are emerging.

　　However, in comparison, these results are not as groundbreaking as HCS-1.

　　Of course, it cannot be excluded that major research institutes have actually achieved certain results, but for the sake of greater ambitions, they have kept their milestones unpublished and secret.

　　After all, although companies like Umicore and Nichia are happy to cooperate with Orion, they are obviously more interested in keeping the patent rights in their own hands.

　　Orion has seen this in its last meeting with Carodit. The Belgian labs must have been working hard to seize the high ground.

　　If that was the case, Orion would have to speed things up.

　　......

　　In mid-March, after receiving the 'acceptance' letter back from Science, Orion and Toby, had a short video conference to discuss the next step in their research programme.

　　Before the meeting began, Orion sent Toby the relevant information about HCS-1, including data that had already been submitted to journals for publication, as well as those that had not been made public for the time being.

　　As soon as the video call began, Toby asked, "What was in the email you sent me?"

　　Orion said succinctly, "The new experimental plan and related information are in the email, and the samples will be sent soon. In short, I need you to try to find a way to synthesise the HCS-1 material in a stable manner."

　　There was serendipity in the method of making the HCS-1 material in Sarote's lab. In the strictest sense, HCS-1 was only a by-product of the reaction, which was obtained through centrifugal separation as well as further purification.

　　Even if not considering the limited industrial application prospects of the HCS-1 material itself, it is difficult to achieve industrial production just because of this inefficient production method.

　　Unless someone is willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a lithium battery, and then spend a considerable amount of money to dispose of piles of waste material, from an economic point of view, this is clearly impossible.

　　There are two ways to develop the HCS-1 material, one is to improve the preparation method to reduce the production cost. The other is to improve the material itself.

　　With HCS-1 as a reference, it would not be difficult to find HCS-2 or even HCS-3 that would be more suitable for mixing with sulphur monomers if the research continued along the existing ideas.

　　For these reasons, Orion set two directions for the Gordon Institute for Computational Materials. One was the improvement of the synthesis process for HCS-1 materials, and the other was the improvement of the HCS-1 materials itself.