By Candace Stuart
Small Times Senior Writer
July 3, 2001 — America’s rockets’ red glare has gotten a boost from an unlikely ally — one-time weapons designers from Russia and the former Soviet states.
A small tech company in Florida is adapting Cold War technology to create products as varied as rocket propellants for NASA to superstrong fibers for industry.
With the assistance of the federal government and three national laboratories, Sanford, Fla.-based Argonide Corp. is finding commercial uses for metal powders and fibers as fine as a few nanometers each. Argonide’s manufacturing process is an offshoot of once hush-hush research for improving the Soviet arsenal.
The collaboration allows Russia’s highly skilled scientists to continue their research on nanomaterials while bringing a potentially lucrative industry to America’s shores. Equally important to the U.S. government, it keeps what could be deadly technologies from terrorists, rogue countries and other national threats.
“We’re looking at different applications for these technologies … totally peaceful applications,” said Gary Tydings, chief operations officer of the United States Industry Coalition Inc. The coalition has 117 members, including Argonide, with 92 of those actively involved in partnerships in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Starting in the 1970s, the Soviet Union developed a method to produce metallic nanopowders in hopes of building more powerful rockets and explosives. Metals are used as catalysts in fuels and explosives to make them burn faster; metals in the form of ultrafine powders are even better because they offer more surface area on which a reaction can take place.
“When you get the particle size small enough, much of your surface area is atoms,” said Fred Tepper, president of Argonide. “The reaction will be quicker and more efficient.”
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is one of several agencies and companies intrigued with Argonide’s approach. In 1998, NASA awarded Argonide two Small Business Research Grants totaling $670,000 to develop an aluminum nanopowder that could be added as an accelerant to rocket fuel. In theory, the accelerant would allow all the fuel to combust in the rocket engine to provide maximum thrust.
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University verified that the accelerant improves fuel efficiency. But it also played havoc on the engine system, Tepper said.
“NASA’s people will have to redesign the plumbing and create a new engine system” if they want to use the accelerant, he said.
Tepper became interested in the nanopowders in the early 1990s while traveling in Siberia for his employer, Mine Safety Appliances Co. As vice president of the Pittsburgh-based industrial health and safety company, he was exploring business relationships with the Russian scientific community when he learned of the project at the Republican Engineering Technical Center in Tomsk.
Scientists told him they had successfully made metallic powders with 100 nanometer diameters by blasting wires with a powerful electrical pulse in a reactor containing the inert gas argon. The wires vaporized, reforming as particles.
Tepper decided to step in with his own money when Mine Safety Appliances declined to make a deal with the Tomsk center. He founded Argonide in 1994, the same year that USIC launched. As a founding member of USIC, Argonide could participate in the Department of Energy’s Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, a program that provides matching funds to U.S.-Russian ventures.
The funding system was designed to accommodate Russian laws, Tydings said, which allow scientists in Russia and the three other participating states to assign rights to their intellectual property to federal laboratories in the United States. The labs, in turn, can provide exclusive licenses to American companies such as Argonide. The federal government provides the Russian scientists’ salaries.
Argonide entered into several Cooperative Research and Development Agreements with the DOE, including a two-year $1.4 million deal in 1999 involving the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., and Allied Signal Corp. in Kansas City, Mo.
The CRADA supports scientists in both nations, Tepper said, and is particularly cost-effective in Russia. “The wage scale is so pitifully low,” he said. “You can employ a senior scientist for $3,000 a year.”
While that salary may seem a pittance to Americans, it helps Russia maintain its brain trust and build its economy, Tydings said. At the same time, the collaborations make American businesses more competitive in the global market.
Joel Katz, a staff scientist in Los Alamos’ materials science division, said he was not aware of the “electro-exploded” process before participating in the Argonide project. The collaboration let him analyze and evaluate the technology, which dovetails into his own scientific interests.
Most of the nanopowders are made in Tomsk to take advantage of the low cost of labor and scientific expertise, but some are produced at the Sanford facility. Wires of any bendable metal can fed into the reactors in a continuous manufacturing process, Tepper said, producing kilogram quantities.
Besides manufacturing and marketing nanopowders, Argonide is beginning to offer low-weight, high-strength nanofibers that can be added as filler to composite materials. Tepper has collaborated with researchers at NREL, the Tomsk center and the University of Florida in Gainesville to produce and analyze the alumina fibers, which they say are two nanometers in diameter.
Tepper says the fibers cost $600 per kilogram and have a number of applications, from reinforcing plastic dental crowns to material for Stealth-like aircraft. “It’s like putting in a wire base in concrete,” he explained. “You can get a significant increase in strength.”
Argonide’s customers are typically university researchers, Tepper said, but he has sold nanopowders to cosmetic and automotive companies, and several companies that make dental products and artificial bones have contacted him about the fibers.
Argonide more than satisfies the USIC’s goals, Tydings said. “He has a product that he’s sold. As far as we’re concerned, that’s a success. That’s a real product and real sales.”
For many applications, it is not cost-effective to use nanopowders and fibers, Tepper said. Among those is Fourth of July fireworks, Tepper said, although Argonide markets nanopowders for pyrotechnics. But those are very specialized military uses.
“Some applications don’t have a chance,” Tepper said.
null
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Candace Stuart at [email protected] or call 734-994-1106, ext. 235.