NASA LANGLEY, NANOCOMP TEAM UP
HAMPTON — For NASA, Miralon could offer a better way to get to Mars.
For Nanocomp Technologies, Miralon could also go a long way to help save our own planet.
The challenge? Figuring out how to massproduce this unique, highstrength, lightweight, carbon-based nanomaterial cheaply enough to live up to its sky-high potential.
Nanocomp’s Managing Director John Gargasz says their Miralon material could one day be embedded in everything from smart clothing to furniture to buildings, automobiles, airplanes and spacecraft.
“The market potential is enormous,” Gargasz said. “If we can get there.”
But the New Hampshirebased company isn’t merely interested in its potential for making things, he said.
The primary feedstock in manufacturing Miralon is methane, the boogie man of greenhouse gases — 25 times more potent than CO2 and responsible for up to 30 percent of global warming.
This means that the process of making Miralon removes harmful methane from the atmosphere and sequesters it.
But that’s not all: A byproduct of making Miralon is hydrogen gas — a green fuel.
NASA Langley Research Center believes enough in Miralon’s potential to have awarded Nanocomp $8.1 million to keep plugging away on the technology and figure out how to scale up production and scale down cost.
It’s not the first government grant awarded to try to mature the technology.
“Other government agencies planted seeds with their early stage technology investments that we’re harvesting,” said Mia Siochi, senior research materials engineer at NASA Langley and lead for its Super-lightweight Aerospace Composites project. “NASA’s goal is to begin using larger quantities of material from Nanocomp to build structures within a few years.”
Not magic, but physics
The Hampton center has been looking into carbon nanotube technology for a while now, said Kimberly Cannon, lead specialist for Langley’s Small Business Innovative Research program that awarded the contract.
Miralon, for instance, was used to help shield the Juno space probe from radiation and the extreme temperatures of space after it launched on its mission to Jupiter in 2011.
And, last year, a fuel tank built of super-strong composites made from Miralon launched on a successful test flight aboard a sounding rocket from NASA Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore.
According to Siochi, that Composite Overwrap Pressure Vessel was the first large item the center built using nanotube yarns.
And it hints at what can be accomplished if the technology can be matured to build even larger and stronger — yet lighter — structures.
Lightweight is key to space work. It costs about $10,000 to launch one pound of payload into low-Earth orbit, said Cannon. Far more to get it to Mars.
Michael Meador, program element manager for lightweight materials and manufacturing at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, has said composites reinforced by carbon nanotubes could reduce the total mass of a launch vehicle by 30 percent.
“We’re not looking at magic materials,” Meador said. “Rather, we’re finding that, when you get down to the nanoscale, there are certain features of materials at that scale that give rise to new properties, new physics, that you don’t see above that scale.”
‘Really cool material’
Carbon nanotubes are carbon atoms bound together chemically in the shape of cylinders, according to NASA. Those cylinders are less than 1/80,000 the diameter of a human hair, yet about 100 times stronger and eight times lighter than steel at that scale.
Many companies can make carbon nanotubes, but in powder form that’s used as an additive — in batteries, for instance. Nanocomp was the first to devise a way to give it large, sheet-like structure.
“The good news and the bad news is, it’s extremely hard to make,” Gargasz said. “But we have progressed the technology significantly over the last 14 years and brought our production capacity up and our price down already by a couple orders of magnitude.”
The current cost to produce Miralon is thousands of dollars per kilogram, he said. They hope to get that down to $10 to $20 per kilogram in the next couple of years, and then to the single digits in seven to 10 years.
Miralon emerges from furnaces looking like black cotton candy, Gargasz said. From there, it can be twisted into yarns or shaped into flat sheets, tapes and pulp. The hope is that its superior physical properties will hold even after the material is scaled up.
For one, Miralon is great at conducting heat and electricity, giving it multiple possible applications for human health, energy efficiency and transportation.
“Turns out, by pure luck, that the wavelength of energy emitted by Miralon is ideally tuned to the human body, creating a gentle, therapeutic heat,” Gargasz said.
If Miralon “heaters” could be installed in clothing, chairs, conference tables, overhead fixtures and the like, he said, individuals could be warmed according to their own needs, rather than an entire building, saving in heating costs.
Or the material could be embedded in an airplane and an electrical current used to monitor the craft’s health and status in real time.
Used to replace steel and aluminum in automobiles, it could lower the vehicle’s weight, fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
“It’s a really cool material,” Gargasz said in a TED talk in September. “It’s got lots of really cool applications.
“But that was then.”
Game-changer?
About a year ago, he said, his company was approached by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program at the U.S. Department of Energy, which is charged with funding “disruptive” energy technologies that can change the country’s energy equation.
“Their team was looking for an effective way to convert methane into clean hydrogen and some useful carbon product,” Gargasz said. “So we took them out back, showed them our furnaces and said, ‘Here you go.’
“But now we had a new challenge: Could we make this process work at a level that could impact the planet. We had to start thinking on a whole new scale. We had to start thinking in quads.”
A quad, he said, is a quadrillion BTUs of energy. By comparison, a single ocean oil tanker can hold about 84 million gallons of crude oil. A quad equals 95 oil tankers, or about 1 percent of this country’s annual energy consumption.
The way Gargasz envisions it, all those methane flares lighting up places like North Dakota’s Bakken oil and gas fields treat methane as a waste product, fouling the atmosphere in the bargain.
“But what if we could scale up our black cotton candy machine, our Miralon furnace, and place it right at the flare site,” Gargasz said. “Instead of that methane going up in smoke, we could convert it to clean hydrogen energy and Miralon.
“Could this concept be a game-changer for the planet? We decided to model it to see if it could be.”
By their computations, globally there are 5.2 quads of energy in flare gas emissions each year. If two-thirds of that gas could be funneled into furnaces instead, they could create 49 million tons of Miralon and 2 quads of clean hydrogen.
Those 49 million tons of Miralon would sequester about 187 million tons of CO2, while the excess gas could be used to power the furnaces.
Then, if all that Miralon were used to its potential in efficiencies, he said, it would save 45 quads of energy, or nearly half the country’s annual energy consumption, and reduce CO2 emissions by 3 billion tons, or about two-thirds of what the country produces each year.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” Gargasz said. “There is tremendous technical risk, execution risk, marketed option risk to achieve this vision. This is hard stuff. But there is reason to be optimistic.
“It’s an audacious challenge, sure. But we’ve talked to really large groups of smart people in the last year and, fortunately, they haven’t thrown us out of the room.”
Even major players in the oil and gas industry have been receptive, he said.
“As opposed to seeing us as a threat,” Gargasz said, “they actually see a concept like ours as strategic to their future.”
Nanocomp was founded in 2004. Earlier this year, it was acquired by Texas-based chemical giant Huntsman Corporation, a move that Gargasz says will help accelerate the commercialization of Miralon.