By DITA DE BONI
Car builders, aircraft manufacturers and highway maintenance companies in the United States are queuing for a chance to use a technology developed by Auckland University's engineering faculty.
Dr Debes Bhattacharyya and two doctoral students have spent almost 10 years developing a process for roll-forming fibre-reinforced thermoplastic sheets, and have sold the rights to the process to Florida metal fabricating firm Pyramid Mouldings.
Pyramid is already talking to Toyota, Boeing and the US Army, among others, about uses for the patented process.
Dr Bhattacharyya and his team have negotiated a "six-figure sum plus very good royalties on turnover" with UniServices, the commercial arm of the university.
The technology, which has taken the university three years to patent in New Zealand, Australia and the United States, is a manufacturing method in which flat sheets of fibre-reinforced plastic are transformed by being passed through grooved rollers at high speed.
Fibre-reinforced thermoplastic is a relatively new material. Unlike thermoset plastics, which cannot be reformed once they have set, thermoplastic can be softened with heat and reformed, making it recyclable and "weight for weight, stronger and stiffer than most metals," says Dr Bhattacharyya.
Car manufacturers are particularly keen on thermoplastic, seeing it as a way to reduce the weight of cars, thereby cutting fuel consumption and boosting vehicle efficiency.
Because thermoplastics are new, manufacturing is still inefficient and underdeveloped, he says.
The university process enables up to 11m a minute to be fast-moulded, and the team hopes to lift this to up to 30m a minute soon.
Dr Bhattacharyya says chemical giants, including ICI and Du Pont, have tried without success for many years to perfect the process of rolling thermoplastic.
"I don't think we are super-intelligent, but I do think those companies were on the wrong track and couldn't commit enough people and resources to developing this process."
Because thermoplastic does not corrode and can be reinforced to be as strong as most commonly used metals, US highway authorities have expressed an interest in replacing 10,000km of roadside guardrails a year with it.
Boeing is interested in using moulded thermoplastic in aircraft components.
Dr Bhattacharyya and his team can see at least five more years of research and development with Pyramid as they work on a wide range of commercial applications for the process, especially in the automobile industry.
"The continuous nature of the process and its versatility and speed make it an extremely attractive technique for producing lightweight, structurally efficient components in a variety of applications," he says.
UniServices hopes to make money from the process in other parts of the world, despite having essentially "given the secret away" by publishing details of Dr Bhattacharyya's work in academic journals around the world.
"The rest of the world is our oyster," says Keith Jones, UniServices manager of engineering contracts.
"We kept the process under wraps before gaining the patent," he says.
"But as with all university research, we now face the prospect that other people can see a paper copy of how it works.
Mr Jones says UniServices has the advantage of 10 years of accumulated knowledge about the process.
"It's easy to see how it works on paper, but it's not so easy to make it work yourself. It's highly specialised knowledge.
"This process is a world first, and could prove very valuable to the University of Auckland."
Fantastic plastic brings queue to university's door
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