Four strands that share the substrate rather than a market: a battery whose case does structural work, a molecule-first approach to fuels, converting waste heat into something useful, and a fusion first-wall built around being repairable.
A battery whose enclosure is load-bearing, thermally instrumented and chemically active in its own right. Graded filler zones next to the cell faces form in-plane thermal rails, and thin interlayers are tuned to produce a mechanically robust solid-electrolyte interphase that suppresses dendrite growth. The structural variant carries load and current at once, so the pack stops being dead weight bolted into a frame.
Modules that take waste heat and either radiate it in a controlled spectral band or convert it into usable power, rather than moving it somewhere else and calling that cooling. It is the same phonon-to-photon mechanism the thermal work rests on, aimed at recovery instead of rejection.
A radiant-glaze veneer behind a photovoltaic cell, passing sub-bandgap energy through to a thermophotovoltaic layer instead of letting it become the heat that ages the cell. Solar panels lose efficiency and lifetime to their own waste heat; this points the substrate’s emission mechanism at that problem.
Low-loss conductive rails and harvesting elements formed into structural panels, so power can be routed, harvested and serviced on the same part that carries the load. It follows directly from the board work — once a substrate can hold sealed conduits, a wall can be a bus.
An engineered hydrocarbon designed as a drop-in replacement for gasoline — preserving compatibility with the engines and infrastructure that already exist, while changing where the molecule comes from. The bet is that upstream origin is easier to change than the entire vehicle fleet.
A synthetic hydrocarbon family emphasising tunable combustion and industrial synthesis routes compatible with the laboratory’s own process assumptions. Where Lab Gas targets compatibility, this targets designed reactivity.
A circulatory working gas for thermal transfer and reuse in closed loops — chosen for heat capacity, chemical stability and how many cycles it survives rather than for combustion behaviour. It is the fluid the rest of the thermal architecture would move.
A flexible fuel family designed to be synthesised off-world from local resources, with Mars in-situ resource utilisation as a constraint from the beginning rather than a retrofit. Compatible with reusable vehicles and conventional engine architectures.
A fusion first-wall concept built around maintainability rather than plasma performance. The wall is a set of petal cartridges a robot can swap in hours, which shifts the operating economics from month-scale replacement to days-scale. The most speculative entry on this page, and it is listed rather than promoted.