A team of UNM engineering researchers is working to develop a new composite material to rival concrete, which deteriorates after a few decades. The team is looking to make the material as blast-resistant as possible. The research is being funded by more than $2 million in grants from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office. To find out more, the Daily Lobo talked to one of the team's leaders, Mahmoud Taha.
Daily Lobo: Why is your team so interested in making the material blast-resistant, instead of researching other possible applications?
Mahmoud Taha: Well, there are other applications, and we are interested in some of them, but blast resistance was the area that was most interesting for the granting agencies.. You see, there is a lack of materials that have strong blast resistance, so that was a key issue. But, of course, with the changes of material that we are trying to produce, there will be a lot of byproducts such as naturally stronger carbon fibers that will not necessarily be able to make a structure more blast-resistant but will be able to be used for greater structural reinforcement and strength.
DL: Who will benefit the most from your team's research?
MT: The composite industry. If we are successful and if we get what we believe we will get - based off of our preliminary results - the whole composite industry will change and see new materials. In particular, such industries like the car industry, which primarily used to manufacture cars using real metal but currently uses weaker forms of composites which most usually mistake for plastic. However, these materials are not plastic, because plastic is a specific type of material unlike composite material. Our new composite will change anything that uses composites including cars, airplanes and even things like tennis rackets.
DL: How long has the team been working on the research and how long will it take to get conclusive results?
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MT: I believe that our team has been working on the project and even smaller investigations since the fall of 2007, and we will be working on the project for approximately the next three years. We already have two provisional patents out on the material and are expecting to have several more within the next year, and basically these patents will allow us to quickly sell the technology to the industry when we are finished. We are also already publishing facts about our research and are actually already producing the material in our lab.
~Donald Duran III
