XClose

Sustainable Development Goals

Home
Menu

UCL spin-out Quantemol helps industries accelerate tech innovation

Specialist chemical modelling software, developed at UCL, is supporting innovations in technologies from telecommunications to spacecraft propulsion.

SDG Case study 9.4 Quantemol

8 October 2020

Quantemol is a UCL spin-out established in 2004 by Professor Jonathan Tennyson (UCL Physics & Astronomy) and Dr Daniel Brown (UCL Computer Science), which now boasts customers as far afield as Japan and the USA. 

“We provide specialist software to companies whose technologies rely on complex chemical interactions taking place under exacting conditions, for example in the manufacture of silicon chips,” explains Professor Tennyson, Quantemol’s chief scientist.

“We are helping customers in industries as diverse as medical devices and generation of cheap energy through fusion.” 

The company develops and licenses software tools that simulate what happens to atoms and molecules in their plasma phase – an unstable state that gases can reach under extreme heat, or low pressure.  

Plasmas are used to manufacture semiconductor devices, such as silicon chips, which are widely used in the electronics industry. Improving their performance through physical experimentation takes time and is costly, so modelling the construction process using computer software helps.  

“Our products, informed by research at UCL, have been widely used by companies in the semiconductor industry.” Professor Tennyson says. “And now we are helping customers in industries as diverse as medical devices and generation of cheap energy through fusion.”

“To propel satellites and spacecraft through space, ‘engines’ which convert an inert gas into a plasma can be electrically controlled to produce thrust. Iodine is being explored as a commercially attractive gas to use, and its plasma properties are being modelled using the Quantemol software.

“Among other things, our software and new database help chemists and physicists create 3D pictures of newly designed molecules and use electron-molecular scattering data to predict their properties.

“Our research is helping manufacturers gain a better understanding of quantum-level processes for molecules that are difficult to isolate and study experimentally,” explains Professor Tennyson.

“By reducing experimental trial and error, we are speeding up the innovation process, so that products reach the market more quickly,” he adds.