Transformative Materials

Destroying bulk stores of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) and organic precursors is a significant challenge for the international community. Today, for example, there are no approaches that exploit chemistries that are truly agnostic in terms of the agents that can be processed. In addition, current approaches require transport of agents from the storage site to a neutralization site. Ensuring safe transport of the agent can add significant cost and time to the process.

The goal of the Atoms to Product (A2P) program is to develop the technologies and processes required to assemble nanometer-scale pieces, whose dimensions are near the size of atoms, into systems, components, or materials that are at least millimeter-scale in size. Many common materials exhibit unique and very uncommon physical characteristics when fabricated at nanometer-scale. These “atomic-scale” behaviors have potentially important defense applications, including quantized current-voltage behavior, dramatically lower melting points and significantly higher specific heats, for example. The challenge is how to retain the characteristics of materials at the atomic scale in much larger “product-scale” (typically a few centimeters) devices and systems.

The BioFuels program seeks to develop renewable jet fuel (JP-8) for military aviation that meets or exceeds JP-8 performance metrics to help reduce the military’s dependence on traditional petroleum-derived fuels. These renewable fuels are derived from cellulosic materials and algal species that don’t compete with consumable food crops. The cellulosic material conversion process aims to demonstrate technology to enable 50% energy conversion efficiency in the conversion of cellulosic material feedstock to JP-8.

Radio Frequency and mixed signal electronics face performance limitations due to the limited circuit complexity possible in typical high-speed/high-dynamic-range compound semiconductor integrated circuit technologies.

The goal of the Engineered Living Materials (ELM) program is to develop living materials that combine the structural properties of traditional building materials with attributes of living systems, including the ability to rapidly grow, self-repair, and adapt to the environment. Living materials represent a new opportunity to leverage engineered biology to solve existing problems associated with the construction and maintenance of our built environments, as well as new capabilities to craft smart infrastructure that dynamically responds to the surroundings.