UMaine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center a resource to businesses and students
Transcript
I’m Habib Dagher. I’m Director of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine but also a professor in civil engineering.
The center as a whole has about 180 people who work here in a 100,000-square-foot laboratory. We bring advanced materials into a variety of construction applications. These advanced materials could be used in building bridges or building buildings, or could be used in blast and ballistic resistance in the fields, or for NASA to take these materials into space.
We work with companies across the state and across the world to bring these materials into construction. We can design a new product, we can build the product in the lab, we can test the product. There’s three facilities in the US that can test wind blades right now. We’re one of the three. We work with the largest wind blade testing companies.
Beyond wind blade testing, we can build buildings and put earthquakes on them. We’ve done testing for companies on the west coast of the US who are trying to develop earthquake resistant buildings for the California market.
We can take nanomaterial, cellulose nanofibers, and test their properties. Think of it as a lab that can take materials and then test them, all the way from a molecular level all the way to the full size product.
We’re building an ocean engineering laboratory. It’s a very unique facility that has a wave basin and a wind tunnel on top of one another. For the very first time we have the ability now to test ocean structures under both hurricane loads as well as very extreme wave loads.
We pride ourselves on our ability to graduate technologies from our laboratory so those technologies can be used by companies. We call that a success.
For example, up in Maine, Hodgdon is an over 150 year old company in the state that built a lot of boats. We partnered with them to build a boat for the US Navy Seals out of composite materials. By partnering with private companies, we can create new opportunities for businesses, creating jobs in this state.
Our motto is “Students first” here in this laboratory. Every year we fund between 100 to 150 students. They could be first-year students, and we teach them safety. We teach them how to use equipment in a laboratory. The students work their way up, just like in any business.
We teach students innovation. We teach them how to create businesses and help them create businesses on their own. For example, two of our students here in the laboratory that met in this lab have developed a company called Revolution Research. Revolution Research is developing bio-based insulation materials using nanocellulose and other nanomaterials.
It’s a great opportunity for students.
There’s a lot of capabilities here in Maine. We look forward to work with clients globally, as well as in the state of Maine.