Towards a Green Stone Age?

• Author: Elizabeth March
• Position: WIPO Magazine Editorial Team, Communications and Public Outreach Division

"This," declares Kolja Kuse, "is the past." He leans across the aisle of the bus to hand us a heavy steel joist. "And this," he says, with a rhetorical flourish, unsheathing a sleek, light-weight bar, "is the future."

Inventor Kolja Kuse and two business partners were en route to the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia. Their mission: to seek partnerships to promote their innovative construction material, which they believe can play a part in reducing global carbon emissions.

Granite sandwich

The new, high performance composite, known as CarbonFibreStone (CFS), consists of a slice of granite with a fine laminate of carbon fiber on one or both sides. "– A bit like a stone-and-carbon-fiber sandwich," explains Kolja. The resulting material is not only elastic, but is as strong as construction steel, as light as aluminium and has better vibration-damping properties than any other known pressure-resistant material.

The story began ten years ago in Kolja Kuse's garage. He was at the time an electrical engineer at Aachen University, specializing in energy production. His brother was a stone mason. Watching his brother at work one day as he cut a slab of granite to make a kitchen worktop, Kolja imagined a polished stone stove-top, with invisible induction coils hidden beneath a perfect, seamless working surface. Not given to idle dreaming, he built one.

"It looked great," he recalled. "But when the hob got above a certain temperature, the stone would always expand then crack, like an explosion." He tried compressing the edges with huge machines, but it was no good. "The mechanical engineers and material scientists told me, you can't stop the stone expanding. It's impossible. So I pretty much gave up on the idea."

Break through

There followed one of those moments of serendipity that often precede a technological breakthrough. Flying home to Munich from a meeting, Kolja picked up a brochure about carbon fiber production which had been left on the seat. Carbon fiber, he learned, shrinks longitudinally when heated. Intrigued, he wondered what might happen if he were to coat his beloved granite with carbon fiber. He teamed up with a carbon fiber specialist and gave it a go. Somewhat to their astonishment, the experiment was a success. No matter how high they heated the new hob, the stone never fractured.

The explanation for the...