Read the full article here: https://www.bizjournals.com/cleveland/news/2025/09/18/peak-nano-nanotech-film-optics-capacitors-fusion.html
Michael Hus is looking for a 14-acre property between Cleveland and Akron on which to expand the operations of Peak Nano Systems LLC, the Valley View-based developer of nanoscale plastic films used to make components for optics and energy systems.
Hus, Peak Nano's general manager and senior vice president of engineering, said his company wants to build a 250,000-square-foot plant that would enable it to participate in its biggest opportunity yet — the $1 trillion annual global market for fusion energy, which is still taking shape.
Peak Nano already is using its NanoPlex films — nanometers-thick plastic films extruded and layered during proprietary processes — to make lenses for night-vision goggles and other optics products at the company's 48,000-square-foot plant in Macedonia.
Now Hus and his colleagues are scaling up Peak Nano's novel film technology at the company's headquarters, research and manufacturing facility in Valley View to make film capacitors used in products ranging from electric vehicles to power grids.
"Years of research enabled [NanoPlex] to demonstrate performance, and now we're scaling it up," Hus told the Cleveland Business Journal. "Our film enables our customers to save a lot of money in their systems as well as make them more powerful and have greater value to their customers. And we can share in that value."
Peak Nano's film-making technology was developed in the late-2000s at Case Western Reserve University in collaboration with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
In 2006, CWRU professor Eric Baer received a 10-year grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a center for layered polymeric systems at the university, a foundation listing shows. Michael Ponting, now Peak Nano's chief science officer and co-founder, did research for his Ph.D. in chemical engineering and macromolecular science at Baer's center.
When Ponting graduated in 2010, Baer convinced him to "start a little company ... to see if we could scale up the [nanofilm] technology ... and see if it was viable for continual manufacturing and translating this top technology over to the military," Ponting told the Cleveland Business Journal.
The university spun out the polymer center's optical and capacitor film-making techologies to Ponting and his collaborators as PolymerPlus LLC, which used the technology to commercialize NanoPlex.
PolymerPlus started out in Sherwin-Williams Co.'s incubator in Valley View, growing to 10 employees before moving in 2012 to the company's headquarters at 7700 Hub Parkway.
"Now we're 120 [employees] and still in the Cleveland area," Ponting said.
"We took 10,000 square feet, built our first co-extrusion system to make the ... nano-layered plastic films ... and then ended up growing again, producing more optics for the Air Force, DARPA and the Navy, and capacitors for the Navy," he said. "The technology got to a point where I needed more investment capital to put [in] ... larger scale equipment."
CWRU professor Baer connected Ponting with Jim Welsh and Chad Lewis, founders of Peak Nanosystems LLC in Coppell, Texas, which focused on developing and deploying nanotechnology, especially in the area of optics.
Peak Nanosystems partnered with PolymerPlus in 2016 to help scale the Cleveland-area startup's production of layered gradient refractive index optical lenses and acquired PolymerPlus for undisclosed terms in 2020 with help from $25 million in funding from Hong Kong-based Squadron Capital, according to a statement.
By October 2021, Peak had shortened its name to Peak Nano, moved its headquarters to Valley View and landed another $25 million in funding from Squadron Capital to finish building its $30 million Macedonia optics facility.
Welsh, Peak Nano's CEO, and Lewis, its president, "brought in all this investment capital to grow us to the size we are now," Ponting said.
All told, Peak Nano has raised about $150 million in capital, Shaun Walsh, the company's chief research officer, told the Cleveland Business Journal.
Hus, who spent more than 30 years at Dow Inc. developing plastics, used the investment to scale up Peak Nano's Macedonia facility to make LGRIN lenses for the company's HawkSight optics systems, which are used in night-vision goggles for the military and police forces, as well as for commercial users, such as hunters and hikers.
NanoPlex films extruded at Peak Nano's Valley View facility have "hundreds of refractive indexes" that enable the HawkSight lenses to bend light in different ways, Walsh said. The company's artificial intelligence-powered software designs ideal lenses for each customer, he said.
Spools of NanoPlex are transported to Peak Nano's Macedonia facility, where robots housed in a clean room cut the films and build lenses from hundreds, thousands — and even a million — layers of NanoPlex, Walsh said. The lenses are assembled to make objectives and eyepieces for the company's optics systems, Walsh said.
"We're the only [manufacturer] in the world going from plastic film to a lens. Everybody else just smashes plastic together and cuts it into a lens with a fancy lathe, or injection-molds a lens," Hus said.
"We had to invent a whole manufacturing process to go from this plastic film that's been layered all the way to our final optic, and do it in a way that's reproducible and scalable and cost-effective," he said.
That's what makes Peak Nano's Macedonia "a world-class optics manufacturing facility," which company leaders like to call an "optics foundry," he said.
"I realized this [nano film technology] had the potential to bring a lot value," said Hus, who joined Peak Nano in 2019. "That potential now has turned into something of a reality."
Demand for electricity worldwide is expected to grow by 79% from 2022 and 2050, mostly because of increased electric vehicle charging and increased demand from data centers that power AI applications, according to Ignition Research.
So Peak Nano's researchers and engineers have turned to using NanoPlex to develop capacitors for EVs and their charging systems, power grids, mobile power systems and, eventually, fusion energy plants.
Peak Nano makes these capacitors — battery-like electrical devices that store and release energy quickly — by wrapping metallized strips of NanoPlex around a core and then installing the bundles of film in housings. NanoPlex film capacitors can regulate power flow to EVs, EV chargers, heavy electricity users such as data centers and even electromagnetic aircraft launch systems on military aircraft carriers, Walsh said.
In each market, capacitors made from NanoPlex enable improvements in performance and reductions in cost, the Peak Nano team said.
In electric vehicles, for instance, capacitors that sit between the electric motor and battery store energy that can be discharged more rapidly than batteries, allowing for bursts of power, wrote Bridget Mohney, a Peak Nano marketing program manager, in an April blog post.
Peak Nano's film capacitors are smaller and lighter than those of competitors, discharging energy more efficiently, maximizing torque in heavy-duty EVs, extending battery life and reducing cooling requirements, which translate to improved driving distances, Mohney wrote.
Much larger Peak Nano capacitors can be used to step up, step down, smooth out and condition power produced by power plants so it can be transmitted through the power grid and used in data centers, Walsh said.
Fusion energy is produced by applying intense heat and immense pressure to hydrogen isotopes atoms to cause them to fuse, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Peak Nano's film capacitors can deliver massive amounts of pulsed power that drive lasers or magnets to initiate the fusion process.
One type of fusion reactor in development uses large banks of capacitors to store and rapidly discharge the energy needed to power high-intensity lasers, which compress and heat hydrogen fuel pellets to trigger a fusion reaction, creating energy.
"So the capacitor is really the engine that drives a fusion reactor" of this type, Hus said.
For more than a half-century, scientists have tried producing fusion energy because it offers a potential long-term energy source that uses abundant fuel supplies and does not produce greenhouse gases or long-lived radioactive waste, the Energy Department says.
Although creating fusion systems is difficult and costly, commercial deployment of fusion energy could secure U.S. energy independence, stabilize low-carbon grids with clean power, promote additional energy production to support growing power needs and drive economic growth, the Clean Air Task Force states.
The task force, which calls itself a "nontraditional, fact-based, environmental organization," counts 25 U.S. private companies that have secured more than $6 billion in private funding to put fusion energy watts on the grid in the 2030s.
Meanwhile, the global fusion industry raised $2.6 billion in private and public funding in the 12 months ending in July alone, according to the annual Global Fusion Industry Report by the Fusion Industry Association.
"The acceleration of capital, even when the global economy has tightened, is a signal of maturing investor confidence, technological progress and a rapidly coalescing supply chain," said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, in a statement. "The maturation of the ecosystem and increased interest from governments via public-private partnerships show fusion is no longer a purely scientific effort; it is a global industrial movement."
The market for fusion energy plant construction and equipment, not including ongoing operational costs, could reach $1 trillion by 2050, Ignition Research forecast a year ago.
"Obviously, we're not going to get to a trillion dollars [from] this market, but it shows you the scale of what is at stake," Walsh said.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Devens, Massachusetts, one of several major global efforts to create fusion energy, has "partnered with a power company named Dominion Energy," he said. "They're talking about being live with a 400 megawatt system in 2035."
"Whoever masters [fusion energy] and becomes the de facto market-share leader is going to control energy for the next century," Walsh said.
Read the full article here: https://www.bizjournals.com/cleveland/news/2025/09/18/peak-nano-nanotech-film-optics-capacitors-fusion.html