Project Brief
General Competition (October 1998)Nanostructured Chemical Feedstocks: The Next Generation of High-Performance Polymeric MaterialsReduce the costs of feedstocks for a new generation of plastics by two orders of magnitude and develop efficient, high-volume feedstock production methods. Sponsor: Hybrid Plastics, Inc (formerly Hybrid Plastics LLC, Inc.)18237 Mount Baldy CircleFountain Valley, CA 92708-6117
The U.S. Air Force has developed a new family of high-performance hybrid plastics with advanced properties that potentially could be applied to a wide variety of consumer and industrial products--products as diverse as contact lenses, carpets, automobile windshields, and golf clubs. These plastics incorporate nanostructured polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes, or POSS. POSS hybrid plastics are organic-inorganic materials that combine the features of organic polymers with those of ceramics. The Air Force has produced polymeric materials with POSS technology that are lighter, more durable, and able to withstand higher temperatures than conventional polymer formulations, but many other substantially improved properties also are possible. POSS technology might launch the first new wave of high-performance plastics and polymer applications since the 1950s. Technical and economic limitations prevent this, however. Depending on the feedstocks used for their production, a pound of POSS material costs between $1,000 and $5,000, and production can take as long as three years. Hybrid Plastics, the only producer of POSS technology, proposes finding new feedstocks to make POSS materials and developing processes that will overcome production limitations. The project's major challenge is to accomplish these ambitious goals in a way that reduces the cost by a dramatic two orders of magnitude, to between $10 and $50 per pound. ATP support will allow the company to pursue this aggressive program rather than focusing on much less ambitious projects. Hybrid Plastics will look for new raw materials among the silanes (similar to hydrocarbons, but with silicon replacing some carbon, and produced in high volume for the silicones industry), silsesquioxane/silicone resin wastes (byproducts of the silicones industry), and--least expensive of all--common sand. Major subcontractors will be the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.) and the Department of Chemistry of the University of California at Irvine. A totally successful project would, within a few years, generate annual sales within the plastics industry alone of an estimated $66,250,000. Even if costs are reduced by only one order of magnitude, the polymer/plastics industry is so large and diverse that this project would spawn substantial economic and technological benefits for the nation.
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