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Mining Plastic

© Adam Hughes

Have you ever seen those commercials that tout a miracle substance that can be used for anything from race car bodies to delicate medical probes? If so, you probably felt a little suckered when the voice-over revealed that the super material was plain old plastic. But in truth, plastics, or more accurately polymers, really do offer a tremendous range in physical properties that make them perfect candidates for many of life's little (and big) conveniences and necessities. If those polymers are combined with other materials, they can form composites that offer even greater versatility and are of vital importance to many hi-tech manufacturing fields. However, designing such materials from a purely experimental, trial-and-error perspective can be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. As in many other fields of scientific endeavor, materials scientists have turned to computational modeling to overcome these obstacles.

One institution where the importance of modeling in the development of new materials is quickly being embraced is the U.S. Government, and in particular the Department of Defense. Scientists in the DoD are continually searching for lighter and stronger materials with which to build our weapons and transport systems to maintain the Unites States' military superiority. Because of the need for unique combinations of materials, composites of two or more constituent substances are being investigated. A major thrust of this type of research is the use of modeling techniques for the purpose of determining candidate materials and screening out the undesirable ones.

An example of this methodology can be seen in a collaboration between the DoD and researchers at Clark Atlanta University (CAU). This fledgling project is headed by Dr. David Veazie at CAU, with the goal of providing a set of computational and analytical protocols to DoD researchers for the efficient selection and screening of materials candidates, all without ever stepping foot in the lab. Dr. Veazie currently has an extensive and ever-growing database of experimentally-determined composites properties. By utilizing these properties in an extrapolation scheme, it should be possible to make intelligent decisions about the viability of certain combinations of materials in composites design. The result would be a streamlined method of choosing materials for rigorous laboratory and field tests.

Such use of existing property databases and computational methodolgies are becoming the rule rather than the exception. There are now large research efforts in place that focus on nothing more than the efficient use of information which is already available. Over the years, much effort has been repeated over and over again, simply because researchers needed a certain piece of information but had no idea that someone

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