UCF scientist enjoys work with ‘disruptive’ ceramic material

Bill Easter’s hobby and profession is high-end tinkering with industrial ingredients; he’s a “materials guy” with dozens of patents in his name and generous support from NASA.

Easter has been captivated lately by an obscure material that even Easter had not appreciated initially: “polymer-derived ceramic.”

Stirred and baked in his laboratory, the stuff shows promise to outperform metals and plastics, and significantly improve cars, computerized devices and other manufactured goods, he thinks.

“I love materials,” said Easter, 61, in an energetic talk about scientists, commodity pricing and the “golden age” of materials, all for a point.

He needs help, as scientists to convey his enthusiasm for properties of a material he formulated routinely do, ushering his discovery from his lab, at UCF’s Business Incubation Program at Central Florida Research Park, to an assembly line.

Spacecraft heat shields, highend brake disks, turbine blades in power plants and bulletproof vests are some of the places where ceramics are put to work. At home, cutlery has arrived made of stay-sharp ceramic.

But ceramics often are pricey: Easter’s goal is high performance at low cost. The particular ceramic he has in mind he held up as if it was a hamburger patty.

The object was black, squared off and granular. In his grasp and view, the crude ingot is startlingly unique, readily manufactured and poised to rock the materials industry.

“It’s magic,” he said, searching about a year ago, doesn’t fully understand and doesn’t have a name for that’s more catchy than “coal-core composite.”

“As a scientist and engineer, one shouldn’t use the word magic but there are some interesting things that need to be studied,” Easter said.

Touring his lab of bubbling liquids and bizarre containers, he explained that seeking investors is not for pretenders. But if Easter is deferential, he is not a newbie.

He got a geology degree at the University of Texas; a degree in chemical engineering at Drexel; and a master’s in engineering sciences at Penn State.

For 17 years, Easter worked at AT&T and Bell Labs in microelectronics.

Then, 16 years ago, he founded Semplastics, a company based in Oviedo, now with eight employees. Most are scientists and engineers. Semplastics’ “precision plastic engineered components” has been his bread and butter. Buyers are semiconductor, medical, aerospace and petroleum companies.

But in 2012, NASA disclosed that new space telescopes will need mirrors comprised of a material that is more stable, lightweight and affordable. It was a clarion challenge for Easter. He responded by branching Semplastics into X-MAT, a business line based on polymer-derived ceramic.

Ceramics are manufactured in a variety of ways.

X-MAT’s process heats liquid resin (an ingredient of some plastics) into a wafer of soft, white plastic, which is further heated into a ceramic as thick as an inch