Perseus uses a mold-free process to build massive composite structures like wind-turbine blades up to 150 meters long. The technology combines novel chemistry developed by Dan at Stanford with automation, eliminating expensive tooling and long lead times that plague traditional manufacturing.
The goal of Perseus is to simplify how we build enormous structures. One of the things that we've really focused the tech development towards is wind turbine blades that can be up to 150 meters.
So something like a wind turbine, is that made with a mold?
Yeah, the mold is even bigger than the part itself. And so you need special factories, you need special— just to move it around. The upfront cost and lead times are a huge problem. So we developed a combination of the chemistry processes and the new automation capabilities together to invent a kind of mold-free process. You no longer need the lead times and the upfront on cost of the tooling.
The first key to this technology is some chemistry Dan helped develop while studying at Stanford.
We started talking to blade makers and composite manufacturers, and we kind of identified core constraints that seem to exist in every composite manufacturing process. And then we traced it to a limitation in chemistry. And we didn't use that to then invent new chemistry. We had the chemistry, we just didn't realize what what this phenomenon could be used for. And then when we realized, now we have really weird freedom in how we design process.
