About Us - QuesTek Innovations LLC

We computationally design materials to directly meet user-defined material needs by using our proprietary Materials by Design expertise and technology. We rapidly invent, design and develop, qualify and insert new materials into applications to reduce capital, processing, operating or maintenance costs, or to improve environmental protection, competitive supply or competitive advantage.  We estimate that we reduce development times by as much as 50+% and costs by 70+% as compared to traditional material development methods. 

Technology and Material Focus

We develop and utilize sophisticated physics-based technology that incorporates industry-leading mechanistic models, software and fundamental material parameters. Our experience, expertise and interest span a wide variety of material systems, and we believe that most materials (including polymers, ceramics, fibers, etc.) will be designed in the future. A good part of our current focus is designing, inventing and developing environmentally-friendly or high-performance alloys but our methodology and technology applies across many material systems. Our commercially-available alloys include Ferrium® S53®, Ferrium M54™, Ferrium C61™ and Ferrium C64™.

Business Model and Focus 

We secure intellectual property for our inventions, and have more than 30 patents pending or awarded worldwide. We commercialize our material or material process IP through licensees, and derive long-term revenue through licensing agreements; we support our licensees and view our licensees as very key partners for future mutual success.  We work for a wide variety of commercial, governmental and other clients, and much of our work for commercial clients is confidential.  We’re highly focused on using advanced computational material science to rapidly introduce valuable new materials to the real world, and have developed and assembled the integrated, applied expertise to do so. 

Background

QuesTek was established in 1996 by four individuals affiliated with Northwestern University (of Evanston, IL, USA) to commercialize Prof. Gregory B. Olson’s pioneering academic work in the field of computational materials design. Since then we’ve steadily grown by leveraging a stream of fundamental research insights, software, material design tools, and stage-gate design practices developed both internally as well as by others. Our resulting integrated suite of skills, software, tools and practices and systems-based approach constitute our proprietary Materials by Design technology, which we use to address some of the world’s most challenging materials problems and opportunities. We’ve received many honors and awards, and are a leading recipient of SBIR/STTR awards in the State of Illinois.

The image below contrasts how our Materials by Design effort focuses on fundamental, physics-based analysis with a limited number of prototypes, rather than conventional empirical development which may require dozens of prototypes.