Developed by Dr. McIlroy, silica nanosprings are a scalable and mature technology. The scalability of the process has lowered the time to make large quantities, i.e., grams, from months to a couple of hours (at laboratory scale). Silica nanosprings has been proven to be a highly versatile material upon which to engineer hierarchical materials with multipurpose functionality.

The advantage of our process is that it only requires temperature as low as ~325^oC, it is an atmospheric process, and only takes 30 minutes to grow a 60 μm mat of nanosprings. Our research teams remain the only ones capable of producing nanosprings suitable for fiber reinforced composite materials, and hierarchical coatings to engineer multifunctional materials.

This silica nanomaterial is flexible and provides a surface area of approximately 350 m²g^-1, it is CMOS compatible and allows for a top-down design of hierarchical structures. Thus its wide range of applications. i.e., multifunctional materials, sensors, catalyst support for homogeneous and heterogeneous reactions and bioreactors.