Kurt Schroder
CTO
Dr. Kurt Schroder is CTO of PulseForge Corporation. He is recognized as the father of photonic curing which has now grown into the category of Digital Thermal Processing™. With seminal inventions in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, materials science, radiation physics, and plasma physics, he has spent the last 35 years pushing the limits of pulsed power. Kurt has 36 US patents, and over 60 foreign patents, most of which are directly related to PulseForge technology and its applications.
Kurt is a two-time winner of the prestigious R&D 100 Award which is given for the top 100 inventions in the United States each year. In 2012, the Texas State Bar honored Kurt Schroder as “Inventor of the Year” for the development of photonic curing. This same award was previously given to Jack Kilby for the invention of the integrated circuit. Kurt studied fusion plasmas, pulsed power, and radiation during his Ph.D. research at the University of Texas’ Fusion Research Center as well as his undergraduate work at MIT’s Plasma Fusion Center. While in graduate school, Kurt applied pulsed power concepts to the common hammer that he would later apply to flashlamps. This resulted in a hammer having almost no vibration and greater momentum transfer. It was licensed to over 8 hammer manufacturers and now accounts for the majority of hammers sold in the US with sales exceeding $2B. For his postdoctoral work, Kurt created the world’s first real-time onboard telemetry system for a railgun projectile at the Institute for Advanced Technology. Operating at 100,000 g-forces in a 15 Tesla magnetic field at speeds up to 2.5 Km/sec, this system was the precursor for guided electromagnetically-launched smart munitions.
Kurt joined NovaCentrix in 2000. Leveraging his experience with fusion and rail gun technology, he developed a nanoparticle synthesis process based on a 50MW electrothermal gun. Under his leadership as Chief Scientist, the team scaled up the process by 6 orders of magnitude. It still operates today. In 2004, he began experimenting with a camera flash, as an alternative to an oven, to instantly sinter printed metal nanoparticles on plastic and paper forming electronic circuits. He coined the new process “photonic curing.” He and his team then leveraged the electronics of their nanoparticle synthesis process to make an industrial flashlamp system and named it “PulseForge” since it used a pulse of light to “forge” new materials. Since then, dozens of patents have been issued surrounding PulseForge technology and its applications as he and his team continue to innovate.