A molecule that knows when to let go
Pour a few drops of Simon Jones's polymer into a tank of jet fuel and almost nothing visible happens. The fuel still flows. The engine still burns it. But hit that fuel in a crash, the kind of sudden, violent pull that turns a spill into a fireball, and the molecules snap taut, grab the liquid, and refuse to let it shatter into a fine, ignitable mist. The fire that follows is smaller. That is the whole point.
Jones is the founder and CEO of Fluid Efficiency, a Caltech spin-out built around a class of additives the team named megasupramolecules - MSMs for short. The science is genuinely strange: small polymer chains, each one tipped with a sticky end-group that acts like molecular Velcro, link up into structures so large they change how an entire liquid behaves. Under calm conditions they assemble into giants. Forced through a pump or a filter, they release, slip past the violence, and reconnect on the far side. Self-assembling. Self-healing. Shear-stable. Words that read like science fiction and ship like product.
The reason this matters is not poetry, it is economics and safety wearing the same coat. Turbulent drag inside a pipeline can multiply the energy needed to move oil by a factor of ten. The same family of molecule that calms a post-impact fire can also calm the chaos inside a pipe, so the pumps work less and the barrel travels farther on the same push. Two problems most people would never connect - flaming jet fuel and expensive midstream logistics - answered by one chemistry.
The linkages are reversible. When they get into turbulent flow or pass through a filter, they can let go, release tension when it becomes dangerously high.
- Julia Kornfield, Caltech, co-founder and original architect of the scienceVelcro, at the scale of a single chain
Conventional ultrahigh-molecular-weight polymers can reduce drag too, but they have a fatal flaw: push them through enough turbulence and they snap permanently, never to work again. Jones and his collaborators went after a polymer that could break on purpose and heal on its own.
Assemble
Long telechelic chains, each capped with associative end-groups, find each other and link into supramolecules large enough to reshape the liquid.
Release
Under high shear - a pump, a filter, a crash - the Velcro ends let go before the backbone can tear. Tension vents instead of destroying the molecule.
Reconnect
Once the chaos passes, the ends find partners again. The giant reforms. The additive survives to work another day, and another pump.
The catalyst that made those precise sticky ends possible came from Robert Grubbs, the Caltech chemist who won a Nobel Prize for exactly this kind of molecular control. The theory came from Julia Kornfield's lab. Jones's contribution was the unglamorous, decisive one: figuring out how to make longer and longer chains, reliably, in quantities the real world would actually buy.
A dream that waited thirty years for a chemist
The idea of dosing fuel to make it safer is old. Polymer scientists chased it in the late 1970s and early 1980s, convinced that a long enough additive could stop fuel from misting and igniting on impact. Then came a 1984 full-scale airplane crash test, staged to prove the concept, that went badly enough to generate the wrong headlines. The approach was shelved. The dream went quiet for the better part of two decades.
It came back after September 2001, when a JPL scientist named Virendra Sarohia revived the question and persuaded Kornfield to design a better polymer. By 2006 a graduate student had predicted the megasupramolecule on paper. By 2007 the lab was trying to actually make it. That is where the academic story usually stalls - a beautiful prediction, a synthesis nobody can scale. Jones, an industrial chemist who had already spent years commercializing technologies out of Caltech and MIT, started working with the team in 2008. He is the reason the molecule left the bench.
Field notes from a long apprenticeship
- The 2015 results landed in Science: fuel treated with the additive produced dramatically smaller fireballs in impact tests, while engines ran as if nothing had changed.
- The work was backed by an unlikely coalition - the U.S. Army's TARDEC, the FAA, the Schlumberger Foundation, and the Gates Grubstake Fund.
- In 2018, Fluid Efficiency got the molecules registered with the EPA as fuel additives - the regulatory milestone that turns a lab triumph into something you can sell.
There is a tidy irony in the credentials. Jones trained as an inorganic chemist - both his M.Chem. and his D.Phil. came from Oxford in that discipline - and then built a career on polymers, which live on the organic side of the aisle. He did research stints at the University of Arizona and Georgia Tech, then moved into the startup world, including a turn at Contour Energy Systems, before fuel and pipelines became the obsession that stuck.
From Oxford bench to the boardroom
We hope these new polymers will save lives and minimize burns that result from postimpact fuel fires.
- Julia Kornfield, on the safety mission Jones helped commercializePatience as a credential
Most founder stories run hot and fast - an idea, a sprint, an exit. Jones's runs slow and deliberate. He has worked on one family of molecules for more than fifteen years. In a field addicted to the next thing, that kind of patience is its own qualification. You do not get a polymer to behave like Velcro by being in a hurry.
His role across the project has always been the bridge - the person who stands between the equation and the factory. The lab proves a molecule can exist. The market needs barrels of it, consistent and affordable. Jones spent years narrowing that gap, developing practical methods to produce the longer chains the theory demanded without the cost blowing up.
The investors who backed Fluid Efficiency moved fast once they understood the pull. Rhapsody Venture Partners led the early money after customer conversations revealed how badly the midstream industry wanted a drag reducer that did not foul their natural gas liquids systems. Strategic corporates - chemical and pipeline names among them - came alongside.
And there is a small, very human footnote: there is a second Simon Jones, also a chemist, also at JPL, who works on fluoride batteries. Same name, same building, entirely different molecules. If you go looking, make sure you have the right one. The one who makes molecular Velcro is the founder.
Things worth knowing
- An inorganic chemist who built a company on polymer chemistry - a crossover that is unusual enough to raise eyebrows in the field.
- The additive works at vanishingly small doses - on the order of a few tenths of a percent by weight - which is part of why it is commercially viable.
- The molecules detach into smaller parts as they pass through a pump, then reassemble. The breaking is a feature, not a failure.
- One chemistry, two markets: safer aviation and ground fuel on one side, cheaper long-distance oil and gas pumping on the other.