Seeking to Innovate?

Accelerate your company's innovation capacity
[CONTACT US]

INNOVATION RESOURCES

Icon 3CS

Breakthrough:
A table top plug-in technology to melt and cast precious metals for the production of jewelry in a matter of minutes.

Inventor:
Ali Brey and Irshad Khan, South Africa

Financial reward:
$10 million+

The Story:

A jeweled parliamentary mace is an age-old symbol of authority and power, but to Ali Brey and Irshad Khan, two Cape Town-based inventors it is a dazzling demonstration of their inventing prowess and the years of hard work it took to develop a unique technology to melt and cast platinum.

Celebrations

To celebrate ten years of democracy the South African parliament commissioned a new mace to be made. The company who won the contract was having difficulty with the challenging task of casting the platinum rings and turned to Brey and Khan and their newly-formed company Hot Platinum for help. In all the pair produced 850 beads and three large rings.

Hot Idea

The innovation is a potential goldmine as it offers jewelry makers a revolutionary way of working with platinum. The precious metal is not the easiest to work with as it melts at around 2000 degrees Celsius and solidifies within two seconds of the heat being removed. In addition melting and casting typically involves large and very expensive furnaces which can only mass-produce pieces. What the Icon 3CS offers is a way of creating smaller batches or one-off pieces at relatively low-cost. The machine can also melt gold, palladium, silver, and stainless steel and plugs into a standard household electrical socket. It offers small jewelers the opportunity to cast and make their own pieces instead of using a blowtorch (which is a slow and potentially dangerous method).

Thorough Research

The Icon 3CS started life as an academic project that was looking at induction casting. Extensive research revealed that commercial benefits lay with an invention that could be made available to small and medium-sized jewelry makers. The prevailing technology was only suitable for bigger manufacturers. Brey and Khan realized that there was a gap in the market for a simple to use, safe and efficient machine.

A prototype was built and was ready to be tested. But then the inventors realized they didn’t have enough platinum to hand as it hadn’t been budgeted for. Fortunately, the contract to cast the parliamentary mace’s platinum pieces came their way. This was a big bonus as it not only gave them the opportunity to test the viability of their technology, but it also acted as an impressive calling card that demonstrated what their invention was capable of.

Induction Heating Technology

At the core of the machine – which is a little bigger than a microwave oven - is an induction heating technology developed by Khan. It has a melting range from as little as 20 grams up to 250 grams of platinum and the casting process is initiated via a computer-controlled interface with an operator entering the metal temperature and casting speed.

The metal is placed in a crucible in an induction coil and is melted via a magnetic field that creates an electrical current that heats the metal quickly. A powerful solid-state high frequency generator creates the alternating current needed for the fast melting. The almost 2,000 degrees Celsius heat is reached within four minutes.

Development Woes

Brey and Khan did not enjoy a smooth ride to market. Originally they gave themselves three years to develop a prototype, but by applying for a patent they alerted the industry to the gap in the market. And as the inventors believed it was closing they moved their timetable up a year.

The initial funding paid for the development of the prototype, not its commercialization. Unable to source a round of VC funding they eventually found clients who were prepared to pay deposits that paid for construction of the machines. Then with a few successes under their belt they were eventually able to source VC funding.

The inventors continue to innovate and built an induction melting machine for one client that is capable of reaching temperatures of 2,500 degrees Celsius in under a minute using much less power than competitive machines.

Product Protection

Brey and Khan have decided against patenting further technologies as they are concerned that it exposes their knowledge to the market place. Instead they have said that their technology is “internally protected” to make it more difficult to reverse engineer.

by Paul Arnold

[NEXT STORY]

IdeaConnection: What Can we Innovate for You?

Become a
Paid Problem Solver