ROCKAWAY TOWNSHIP, N.J., Feb. 13, 2002 — Could a 6,500-acre military base that makes most of the Army’s bullets, bombs and explosives become one of nanotech’s next hot zones?
That’s the vision a group of enterprising civilian managers are reaching for at the U.S. Army’s Picatinny Arsenal.
With $3.5 million in congressional funding in 2002 and $6 million more requested for 2003, Picatinny’s Public-Private Partnership Office plans to transform part of this sprawling facility about an hour outside New York City into “Nano Valley,” an industrial park and incubator for small companies with mission-critical military small tech.
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The project has signed six academic partners — Rutgers, Princeton, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Stevens Institute of Technology — as well as two small tech startups, Ultrafine Technologies Inc. based in Wilmington, Del., and Nanopowder Enterprises Inc. in Piscataway, N.J.
Ganesh Skandan, vice president of research and development at Nanopowder Enterprises, said that his company will provide Picatinny with software services to help participants measure nanoparticles with sophisticated, small X-ray scattering equipment.
Mark Mezger, the nanotechnologies programs coordinator at Picatinny, said that the goal for Nano Valley is to enable the Army to accelerate the prototyping and integration of nanomaterials and small technologies into the next generation of weapons and military hardware.
“We’re working to create an environment where enterprises with demonstrated laboratory prototypes can develop products with dual use applications,” said Mezger. “We’re offering companies and researchers the opportunity to obtain government investment, be colocated with our Army scientists and engineers and provide linkage to larger commercial firms.”
As a nonprofit corporation, Nano Valley (officially known as the Manufacturing, Research, Development & Education Center for Nanotechnologies) could also contribute to the arsenal’s bottom line by earning rent and reinvesting revenue from intellectual property developed by participating companies.
Of course, if the venture succeeds it also promises to create high-tech jobs and attract more of the kind of innovative nanotech startups the Army wants to foster.
Such an entrepreneurial adventure might seem out of step with traditional military bureaucracy, but the Nano Valley initiative comes just as the Pentagon is striving to reinvent the armed services as a smaller and more efficient, yet ever more lethal force. On that score, a public-private consortium building superior weapons with small technology may be just what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered.
For nanotech startups, Mezger said Picatinny can offer low-cost office space and access to sophisticated labs, production and testing facilities. Also available to small businesses able to build better bombs, small arms, and nonlethal technologies with small tech: the expertise of Picatinny’s more than 1,663 Army scientists, engineers and technicians.
While Nano Valley is not looking to fully fund or own the small technology companies it may help get off the ground at Picatinny, Mezger did say the program has some development funds at its discretion. More important, Mezger said that the project could help the right small tech startups move much more quickly from the lab to product prototypes.
Mezger noted that companies that qualify their products through the Army may make themselves more attractive to investors or acquiring companies. And participating companies would also have the right to develop commercial uses of their intellectual property.
Small tech holds the promise of making even such low-tech munitions as tank shells, mortars and mines into “smart” weapons.
For example, a soldier launching a grenade embedded with MEMS sensors and detonators could control the distance at which it exploded. Such precision control could, for example, enable U.S. troops to kill an enemy hiding around the corner of a building. According to Mezger, the Army’s next-generation rifle, known as the Objective Individual Combat Weapon, will boast such a “smart” grenade capability when it goes into service in 2007.
Mezger’s colleague Pat Black, an Army Corps of Engineers scientist working on the Picatinny initiative, described another scenario in which a single small tech enabled bullet could act like a multiple warhead missile. When fired at a group of enemy soldiers, it would split into different fragments to kill more than one enemy with a single shot.
Some of the other areas of nanotechnology that the Picatinny project will focus on include more powerful and more controllable explosive materials, high-performance and low-weight materials for warhead components, gun systems and armor. Advanced electronics, optics and sensors are other areas of interest.
Research partner New Jersey Institute of Technology is already working with Picatinny to develop “smart” coatings and paints for tanks, helicopters and other combat vehicles. Daniel Watts, director of NJIT’s York Center for Environmental Engineering and Science, said that his group is developing a nanoengineered coating that would “heal” scratches and abrasions and be able to detect when and where underlying metal was corroded. The coating, which would contain tiny sensors, capsules and pumps, may even enable a vehicle to change its camouflage patterns from, say, a forest pattern to a desert design.