by James A. Bacon

I’ve long held a pet theory  that Virginia should strive to achieve a leadership position in high-performance fibers. We’ll never wrest semiconductors and software from Silicon Valley, we’ll never replicate the biotech assets of Boston. There’s no point in chasing faddish industries. Just pick a cool but under-appreciated industry to build on and stick with it. No one  region dominates the manufacture of advanced materials, so that field is still wide open, and it happens to be an area where Virginia has some real strengths.

Among the Old Dominion’s assets are two industrial giants, DuPont, the maker of Kevlar, and Honeywell, the manufacturer of Spectra, super-strong fibers spun in a textile process that are found in a wide array of high-performance materials. Another asset is the presence just down Interstate 64 of the Jefferson Lab’s free-electron laser, which has extraordinary abilities to manipulate matter and develop materials with remarkable properties.

At long last, the Lab has given rise to a material with great commercial potential — Fibril Boron Nitride Nanotubes, a polymer having the appearance of cotton but with a molecular backbone 100 times stronger than steel. BNNT Inc., a start-up company that will produce the fiber next door to the Jefferson Lab in Newport News, asserts that its product matches the strength of carbon nanotubes.

Boron and carbon nanotubes are “the strongest two fibers that will ever be made,” states the company website. But the boron nanotubes out-perform their carbon cousins in important respects,  including the ability to hold their strength at higher temperatures.

The ability to spin the nanotubes into a fiber means means the material can be fabricated by well-understood textile manufacturing processes to blend into body armor, solar cells or other applications. And that’s where DuPont and Honeywell come in. They have that expertise just a few miles down the road in Richmond.

The NASA Langley Research Center, which licensed the technology to BNNT, sees the potential to use the material in new types of armor, thin coatings, batteries and aerospace components. Among their advantages in, say, space-faring vessels, the boron nanotubes can be used in temperature environments up to 800 C, they have unusual electrical properties and they shield against neutron and ultraviolet radiation. The product also has biomedical uses in cancer treatments and nerve and bone regeneration, as well as for electrical insulation, fire retardant cabling, and materials for sensors and robots.

“This is the start of a revolution in materials,” says Dennis Bushnell, a NASA engineer who wants to use the nanotubes for space vehicles.  “Just about everything can be made lighter, and hopefully, cheaper. You’re talking about energy savings all over the place.”

“The current world supply of Fibril BNNT is under 10 grams, less than the weight of four pennies, but the demand for this material is tremendous,” said Mike Smith, the company’s chief scientist, according to Virginia Business. “We believe we can sell as much as we make.”

Here’s hoping that Hampton Roads and Richmond one day will become known as the high-performance fiber capital of the world!