Inventions

Title	Method and apparatus for producing high purity spherical metallic powders at high production rates from one or two wires
Inventors	François Proulx, Christopher Alex Dorval Dion, Pierre Carabin
Application Date	2019-06-06

This is the main invention that has made my career. With my colleague and friend Francois Proulx, we did invent a lot of cool plasma-based processes. This one found its commercial viability, and could now be considered the most advanced plasma atomization system on earth. This is already quite a feat considering plasma atomization is the gold standard for powder production of high quality reactive material. The powder produced from this technology is used by Aerospace companies for 3D printing of parts and prototyping.
The main advantages of this technology is that 1) its production rate is much higher than any other plasma atomization technology, and 2) it can be used for very high melting point material such as tungsten, zirconium, hafnium and such without too much difficulty.

Link: Google patent

Title	Method for cost-effective production of ultrafine spherical powders at large scale using thruster-assisted plasma atomization
Inventors	Christopher Alex Dorval Dion, Francois Proulx
Application Date	2018-07-23

This was my most exciting project to life. It is essentially a small-scale electrical jet engine, which we used to melt and pulverize a titanium wire. It made the finest powder imaginable with a crazy narrow particle size distribution. Some aspect did make it hard to use for commercial atomization, so it was eventually replaced by NexGen (see above) to become the original Plasma Atomization killer.

Link: Google patent

Title	Method and apparatus for producing fine spherical powders from coarse and angular powder feed material
Inventors	Christopher Alex Dorval Dion, Francois Proulx, Ali SHAHVERDI
Application Date	2018-11-14

This technology was never commercialized, but if I had the chance to get a second pass at it, I believe it would have been a pretty cool technology. Essentially, using the usual suspect (high temperature supersonic plasma jet) are taking coarse and angular particles from HDH and re-atomize it and refine it's particle size. Considering HDH is the cheapest source of Titanium powder, this could be an interesting way of producing particles. However, HDH powder already comes with high oxygen content, and oxygen reduction was not really a possibility at this stage.

Link: Google patent

Title	Method and apparatus for the production of high purity spherical metallic powders from a molten feedstock
Inventors	Bernard Allard, Pierre Carabin, Christopher Alex Dorval Dion, Milad Mardan, François Proulx
Application Date	2023-04-24

This idea was to combine the benefits of plasma atomization with the high production rate of gas atomization, but recycling the idea of liquid feed, and feed it in front of a plasma.

Link: Google patent

Title	Plasma apparatus for the production of high quality spherical powders at high capacity
Inventors	Christopher Alex DORVAL DIONWilliam KREKLEWETZPierre Carabin
Application Date	2016-06-06

That's where my game started with with the field of plasma atomization. Moving from 0.6 to 5 kg/h, and shifting the D50 from 80 down to 63 microns was a big deal at the time.

Link: Google patent

Title	Methods for the photo-initiated chemical vapor deposition (picvd) of coatings and coatings produced by these methods
Inventors	Christopher Alex Dorval Dion, Jason Tavares
Application Date	2014-04-17

My first patent. Turned out playing with Syngas and UV light could create hydrophilic and hydrophobic coatings.

Link: Google patent