NYC start-up’s aim: Showing its true colors
Engineers using nanotechnology to build sensors
Across the street from the La Granja Live Poultry market in Harlem, a potentially disruptive technology is taking shape in a converted warehouse once used to store fur coats.
Engineers of a fledgling company called Chromation are using a nanotechnology breakthrough to produce small tech devices that can measure colors with nearly the accuracy of traditional spectrometers, but at a much lower cost.
If their research and development effort succeeds, the units eventually could be used to test pool, spa and drinking water quality, calculate the amount of solar radiation a user has been exposed to, and more.
The first commercial product incorporating Chromation’s technology is tentatively scheduled to be unveiled early this year by an outside business partner.
The technology is targeted to interior design, paint, textile and other types of businesses that require accurate color-matching or coordination.
“A soda company representative could go to a bodega and find out right away if the color in the signs (advertising the firm’s offerings) matched the color of the company’s products,” says Ioannis (John) Kymissis, Chromation’s chief technology officer.
Compact spectrometers produce highly accurate results, but they can cost around $1,000. Color sensors cost less but can’t reproduce such highly detailed results.
“Between those two technologies there’s a pretty wide gap,” says Nadia Pervez, Chromation’s vice president of operations. And the company’s focused on that sweet spot, she says.
Conceptually, the idea makes sense to Kyler Queen, director of marketing and communications for the International Interior Design Association, who says there would be no need to lug different color samples from job to job.
“I definitely could see a use for it in the field. You could give a client an instant answer,” Queen says.
Planning for Chromation began several years ago at Columbia University in New York City when Pervez and Kymissis conducted research in nanotechnology — the study and use of extremely small units.
How small? One inch is equal to 25,400,000 nanometers, according to the federal government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative.
The research work by Pervez and Kymissis involved tiny photonic crystals They theorized that the technology could be used to produce a highly compact, simple device that could separate light into its constituent colors with a high degree of accuracy.
“We stumbled into this — wait, we could make a spectrometer out of this,” Pervez recalls with a laugh.
The idea worked, and eventually led to a research and development contract from the U.S. Air Force to extend the range of the technology to the infrared spectrum.
Aided in part by government grants, Chromation and its now seven-member team of engineers have completed an initial start-up phase where they produced measuring units one at a time. Now they’re in stage two, demonstrating that multiple units can be produced and supplied inexpensively.
The company hopes to apply the technology for multiple uses. For instance, it might eventually be adapted to provide accurate color-matching on reagent tests used to analyze water in pools or other sources.
Chromation’s Harlem base of operations has helped the research effort, placing the company within relatively easy reach of nanotechnology resources at the City University of New York and at Columbia University, which has a clean-room laboratory used for nanoscale research.
As the research work progressed, Pervez and Kymissis found they had to conquer a different, non-engineering learning curve: Building the basics of a successful and lasting business. They face long odds.
More than half of all small entrepreneurship efforts go out of business within five years, according to recent data by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.