Polymer company looks to grow in '09

Nick Malawskey

STATE COLLEGE — At Innovation Park, a small technical company named Strategic Polymer Sciences is looking forward to 2009 with a plan to grow.

CDT/Christopher Weddle

Weilong Tang, front, actuator manager for Strategic Polymer Sciences, and Kailiang Ren, a device manager, work in the company's clean room at the Innovation Park Business Incubator, Thursday, January 29, 2009.

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Company CEO Ralph Russo said the chemical polymer company is looking to add six people in the first half of 2009 — experienced materials scientists and electrical engineers — to deal with a buildup of orders.

“We have $3 million in contract backlogs going into 2009,” the CEO said.

It’s not a bad situation to be in.

The company has spent the last year working out the details for mass production of its unique polymer product — a chemical film used by capacitors in products such as cardiac defibrillators and hybrid vehicles.

Russo, an investor from Silicon Valley, formed the company with Qiming Zhang, a professor at Penn State, who Russo described as “a super-inventor.”

The company has developed a polymer that has about 10 times the energy density of other polymer films on the market, making it attractive for industries looking to save or harvest energy.

One field that is looking at the type of technology Strategic Polymer Sciences has developed are manufacturers of hybrid electric vehicles, some of which rely on capacitors for energy storage.

Russo said he thinks the field will see tremendous growth, and his company is looking to capitalize on that.

“We have a really good value proposition for the automotive people ... not only can we put it in the car cheaper ... we can do it in half the size,” he said.

The polymer films also have high “actuation” capabilities, meaning they can be bent in all kinds of planes. This makes them well suited for other applications such as cardiac catheters or other surgical tools.

“This is next-generation stuff,” Russo said. “We feel it will be a pretty good technology to have in the upcoming age.”