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Facilities

NanoSonic facilities are housed in two buildings totaling 40,000 square feet of office, research and manufacturing space in Giles County, Virginia, USA. NanoSonic’s primary operations are housed in a state-of-the-art 30,000 square foot materials research, development and manufacturing facility, about ten miles west of Blacksburg and the Virginia Tech university campus.

NanoSonic’s base has office space for technical, administrative and sales staff and two primary technical work areas – a 10,000 square foot R&D lab and an open 10,000 square foot process scale-up and manufacturing lab. Research equipment ranges from six well-equipped chemical fume hoods to 20 and 100 liter reactors, to self-assembly robotic systems and small-scale composite production units. Support testing equipment includes UV-vis, FTIR, DSC, TGA, a computer-controlled Instron load frame and others. Separate support labs are available for electronic, optical and microelectronic device fabrication and analysis, including an anechoic chamber that inhibits reflections of electromagnetic waves. Process scale-up equipment includes a 55 gallon drum reactor that produces up to 4,000 pounds of product per day, a CAD-driven fabric cutter, and large-scale self-assembly systems.

Our main building was the first in Wheatland ECO-Park, designed as an environmentally-friendly manufacturing environment that is energy-efficient and LEED Green Building-certified. Our building is used as a test-bed for products and technologies, including our south-facing wall that is instrumented with sensors for temperature and daylighting, and our investigations into a wireless building monitoring system.

NanoSonic also maintains a 10,000 square foot building dedicated to product manufacturing in the nearby Cascades Industrial Park. Located five miles from the main office, it houses large chemical reactors and equipment for pumping, heating, storing and shipping pallets of product to multiple U.S. customers. This nanocomposite resin manufacturing facility supports fabrication of our HybridSil™ and HybridShield™ products with a 200-gallon batch reactor. We have production capability of 4,000 lbs/day for related HybridSil™ and HybridShield™ nanocomposite formulations. NanoSonic’s manufacturing models indicate possible production quantities of 100,000 lbs/year production with the potential for transition to small scale manufacturing at approximately 1,000,000 lbs/year production in the near term.

Current facilities include equipment for the design and synthesis of material precursors, the formation of synthesized precursors into thin and thick film materials, the engineering of materials into devices, and the manufacturing of multiple elements using a robotic-controlled fabrication line. Characterization equipment permits analysis of both nanoscale structure and macroscopic engineering properties. NanoSonic has state-of-the-art computer and networking equipment for materials design, device modeling, data acquisition and analysis, and both internal and external communication.

This equipment, used mostly for room-temperature applications, helps ensure that NanoSonic’s processes conform to green manufacturing practices.

NanoSonic's LEED Green Building

Our main building is located within the Wheatland EcoPark, an environmentally-friendly office and light manufacturing industrial park and the first such environmental development in Southwest Virginia. Designed by local firm Craddock Cunningham Architectural Partners, the building is highly energy-efficient and is a LEED-Certified Green Building using LEED NC 2.2 for New Construction. The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building certification program encourages sustainable building and development practices using rating systems that recognize projects that implement strategies for improved environmental and health performance.

Among the innovative features in NanoSonic’s main building are an instrumented solar wall on the south side and ‘light harvesting’ lighting control in the labs. The solar wall has sensors that measure temperature and automatically operate dampers when the inside temperature is low enough and the outside air temperature coming from the wall is high enough. The south-facing exterior wall is covered with 3,618 square feet (336 m2) of InSpire from ATAS, a unique product that functions as a transpired solar collector. The system can contribute to almost 50 percent reduction in energy use. The aluminum InSpire wall panels contain precision perforations that allow outside air to travel through the face of the panel, and are mounted a few inches from the building’s outer wall. Solar-heated air at the surface of the panel is drawn through the perforations where it rises between the two walls and enters the building's ventilation system. In the summer, the InSpire panels help prevent normal solar radiation from striking the building's main wall. Hot air is thermally siphoned up the wall and vented through holes at the top of the system. During the summer months, bypass dampers allow fresh air to be drawn directly into the building, maintaining indoor air quality.

For the light harvesting, there are light sensors in the laboratories and skylights. When it’s sunny, light streams through the skylights and the interior lighting throttles back halfway; when it’s cloudy, the interior lights are full on – the staff enjoy seeing the interior lights toggle on and off as big puffy clouds and wind alternately block the sun outside.

The staff also enjoys mountain and pasture views from windows that look out over 130 acres of EcoPark farmland, helping maintain a certain balance of high technology and nature.

Green Building Features:
- The building is oriented so that windows in primary office and breakroom spaces are on the south side, with some east and west, for best daylighting and views. Minimal windows are placed on the north side of the building to limit infiltration of winter wind and cold.
- The solar wall on most of the south side has been measured to show a maximum differential of ambient temperature-to-delivered temperature from the wall of about 55 degrees, i.e. 20 degrees outside with 75-degree air coming into the ductwork.
- The loading dock area is air-sealed to minimize interference with the total building HVAC.
- Stormwater runoff from the site is channeled into a natural depression with natural weirs to slow the flow and prevent erosion. Even in the heaviest rains, there has been no standing water in this bioswale.
- Bicycle racks are provided to facilitate bike commuting.
- Windows are low-E coated for better, more energy-efficient performance – they reduce undesirable heat gain in summer and reduce heat loss in winter while still allowing in lots of daylighting.
- Skylights in laboratory areas are linked to indoor light sensors, so that indoor lights gradually turn off as skylights provide sufficient lighting for safe light.
- Toilets conserve water by using separate flush modes for liquids and solids.
- All indoor lighting is energy efficient.
- Automatic lighting and heat control set-backs are informed by occupancy sensors and time of day.
- Outdoor lighting uses low-voltage safety fixtures.
- The building displays signage that describes our sustainable features to help visitors, employees and school children understand what makes our building “green.”