StarAnchor

The following are examples of opportunities that are, or may become, StarAnchor clients. They provide an indication of the types of ventures that meet the selection criteria presented on the Breakthrough Innovations page.

Advanced Materials for energy savings and homeland security This company has formulated a family of advanced materials of unique benefits. The materials are heat-ablative (they reflect heat, and are therefore excellent insulators); resistant to deterioration from water, oil, bacteria, or insects; and can be used in products such as energy-efficient structural panels, "green" roofs, pipe insulators, flood control barriers, and blast mitigation walls. Additional applications are emerging continually.

Tire Recycling Most tire recycling efforts simply shred the tires and then dispose of them in landfills or power plants as before. This company makes products, or raw materials for others' products, out of every aspect of the tire. There is no waste nor is there any component of the tire that contributes to environmental damage through combustion.

Viscosity Improvement for Heavy Crude.Recent increases in the cost of petroleum, and its refined products, place important emphasis on additional reserves. Heavy crude reserves exceed known light reserves by a substantial margin, and are in politically preferable locations. Heavy crude does not lend itself readily to transport through pipelines, however. This patented innovation makes a valuable change in the viscosity of the heavy crude to make it much more transportable.
Eccentric Flywheel. Advances in the energy industry are also important in stationary applications. This patented device takes small, intermittent inputs of energy and converts them to amplified power output in mechanical, hydraulic, or electrical form. Among the applications are reduced emissions (per kWh) from coal-fired electrical generation facilities, distributed generation, and high-efficiency pump and mechanical output devices.
High Efficiency Mining Tool. This advanced tool enables recovery of various hard-rock minerals at extremely cost-effective rates. This advantage brings economic viability to numerous deposits that have previously been uneconomic. In addition, the tool incurs much less environmental disturbance than existing mining methods.
Prepackaged Green Tea concentrate. The beneficial health effects of green tea, and particularly of WuYi tea, have been highly publicized. This company has established an FDA supervised and approved process for concentrating the organic beneficial components of this tea into a single serving liquid pack that is easy to use, highly transportable, and extremely effective. The product comes in selected flavors, sweetened/unsweetened, caffeinated/decaffeinated, and even in a coffee flavor.
High Efficiency Compressor/Expander/Engine. This patented innovation is a very high efficiency compressor, involving many fewer moving parts, and approximately half the volume and weight for a given output. There is a substantial market for compressors in numerous industrial and consumer devices. A compressor operated in reverse is an expander, and there are equally as many opportunities for this application. Finally, when a compressor and expander a linked by a combustion chamber, the result is an engine. In this embodiment, the device offers competitive horsepower values with one-tenth the moving parts, and half the weight and volume of existing engines. Most important, its efficiency is as much as four times that of the existing devices, resulting in fuel economy up to four times as great as currently experienced. Finally, it can use any combustible fluid as fuel, solving the path dependence problem facing the economy regarding alternative fuels.
Ethanol Enzyme. Much attention has been given to alternative fuels, particularly ethanol. Serious attention rapidly determines that the primary present source for ethanol production, corn, is not produced - or producible - in sufficient volume to enable ethanol to become a meaningful replacement for petroleum based vehicle fuels. This patentable innovation will produce a designer-enzyme that will increase the efficiency of production of ethanol for cellulose-based source materials, enabling ethanol production from high volumes of materials now considered waste.
Ethanol Production. This patented process turns any organic material into ethanol. Its application is most relevant for conversion of urban waste into usable ethanol fuel.
Environmental Remediation. This patented mining process, discussed below, was originally developed to economically process very low-grade ores. It turned out to have the additional advantage, when reprocessing ore tailings containing toxins from prior processing, of remediating the tailings and eliminating the toxins.
Environmental Mining. With increasing severity, communities and governments are prohibiting the use of toxins in mining processes, such as cyanide-heap leaching that has been the prevalent method for low-grade precious metal ore processing for decades. This patented process is more effective than the cyanide process, recovering more of the target metal than the cyanide process. It is also more efficient, making recovery at lower capital investment and operating costs than the cyanide method. Finally, as mentioned above, it is not only environmentally-friendly, using only benign materials, but actually remediates feedstocks that have been previously contaminated with toxins.
Mechanical Ore Beneficiation. Another important problem with current mining technology, especially in addressing low-grade ores, is the requirement for large volumes of water to process the ore. This patented process concentrates the target material into 1% of the original volume without the use of any water whatsoever. It is complementary to, and can be used in sequence with, the process described above.

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