Chris Sorenson, Vice President for Research & Development, Hydrograph Clean Power, Inc.

This talk will follow one thread of my research that spans my entire career. The bulk of that career (45 years) was spent as a physics professor; hence, it was largely curiosity-based work funded by governmental grants. Fate led me to study, of all things, soot. In particular, the physics of its aggregation and the optical and transport properties of the resulting aggregates. My researches led me to realize that the fractal nature of soot, and other aggregated materials, would ultimately yield gels if allowed to aggregate long enough. Our experiments proved that hypothesis true; we gelled a cloud of smoke. But serendipity was afoot! The gelled soot aerosol was not soot; it was graphene. That led to a long road of more experimentation, filing for patents, seeking funds from venture capital, forming a team of engineers to scale the process from the physicist’s lab bench to a full-scale production device, and savvy businesspeople to run the show that we call Hydrograph. And yet, with all this ado, this curiosity-based physicist will end with a remarkable connection between fractal aggregates and the inflorescence of a sunflower.