In the mid-70s, the average vehicle on American roads tipped the scales at a hefty 4,000 pounds. Seventy-five percent of that weight came from good old American steel.

That's around the time Ben Wang finished a degree in industrial engineering from Taiwan's Tunghai University.

By the time he arrived in Tallahassee in 1993, after earning a doctorate in industrial engineering from Penn State, that number had been shaved to around 3,000 pounds.

Today, thanks to the use of lighter metals and increasingly sophisticated composite materials, the average American auto weighs in at around a ton.

That reduction in weight, remarkable as it is, has probably gone unnoticed by most people. After all, the transition from, say, the Thunderbird of the Seventies-the 1974 stock model weighed an impressive 5,033 pounds and got 11 miles to the gallon-to the leaner, sleeker models on the road today, took place over two generations of drivers.

But, like it or not, such differences are likely to take on a new significance in tomorrow's world, says Wang, who today chairs the department of industrial engineering at the FAMU/FSU College of Engineering.

Wang also directs the Florida Advanced Center for Composite Technologies (FAC2T), a many-faceted research center on a quest to find better, safer, affordable materials, and more environmentally friendly ways to build them.

Launched in 1998, Wang's small, but steadily growing research group is something of a microcosm of materials research where discrete but intriguing research in the composites field is being done. Current projects range from military applications-a search for lighter materials for munitions manufacturing, with the idea of giving bombs the capacity to carry larger explosive loads-to pursuing lighter, stronger parts for space projects to honing a better process for manufacturing fiberglass boats. The latter already shows promise for making $3.5 billion Florida industry-heavily dependent on volatile chemicals-far less hazardous to workers and the environment than it now is.

But that's the thin edge of the wedge.

The center's broader mission, says Wang, is to increase the competitiveness of the composites manufacturing industry as a whole in the U.S. by enhancing its research, development, and technology transfer capabilities. Wang said the ultimate goal is to reduce the cost of composites and significantly cut the time it takes to move a product from concept to market.

He and his collaborators work with an annual research budget of around $1 million, a third of which comes from the Department of Energy. It's a diverse, multi-disciplinary group that includes 10 or so research faculty, plus postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates who are earning valuable experience in their chosen fields. The researchers come from industrial, civil, chemical, and mechanical engineering backgrounds, the National High Magnetic Field Lab (which provides much of the equipment crucial for analyzing the results), FSU's Center for Materials Research and Technology (MARTECH), and the university's School of Computational Science and Information Technology (CSIT).

Aside from DOE, the group's work has attracted support from NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the offices of research in the Army, Navy, and Air Force, Sandia National Laboratories, and Florida's Department of Transportation. Corporate collaborators include aerospace customers Lockheed Martin, MTS, and Boeing, various automobile material supply firms, Ashland, and Owens Corning.

But Wang's most advanced research deals with a realm of the physical world only the rare person ever sees. Like many others in labs around the globe, Wang is in a race to produce the next generation of practical building materials by seizing the extraordinary promises of nanotechnology.

The field, a familiar buzzword now among engineers and materials scientists, is devoted to exploiting the potential of infinitesimally small bits of matter, along with novel ways to handle them. Conceived in the early 1960s, interest in the field escalated dramatically in the 1990s thanks to the advent of increasingly powerful microscopes and analytical equipment capable of working below the scale of atoms.

Research in nanotechnology, now supported by nearly half a billion federal dollars, is rapidly reducing the size of computers while increasing their power, and also is leading to breakthroughs in the design and fabrication of ever lighter, yet stronger, more versatile materials.

Wang is convinced that if he and other researchers succeed in harnessing the power of nanotechnology, the impact on automobile manufacturing will be nothing short of revolutionary-as it will be on the entire scope of composites research and development.

In its most general sense, a composite is really nothing more than the synthesis of two or more materials with different properties that combine to form a single stronger, more durable material. Composites have been used for thousands of years, since the first construction engineers mixed straw and mud to build their homes.

All composites have a binder or matrix, a substance that surrounds the reinforcement and holds it in place. In the case of the brick, the mud is the binder; the straw acts as the reinforcement; the brick is the composite.

Concrete is a composite, stones or gravel mixed with cement. So is wood, a tree's cellulose fibers (reinforcement) held together by lignin (binder).

Fiberglass reinforced plastic, the first modern composite, was developed in the 1940s by adding glass fibers to plastic. Today, the ubiquitous material comprises about 65 percent of the composites market. Like all modern composites, fiberglass has been valued for its combination of strength, lightness and versatility.

Wang says the next generation of composites will be even more easily molded into different shapes. This poses more freedom for design engineers, since they won't necessarily be bound by the limitations of the materials that they're working with and can look at problems from a pure design perspective.

If Wang finds what he's looking for, fiberglass would become positively primitive. He deems his quest matter-of-factly the “Holy Grail” of composites research, in which nanotechnology, where distances and sizes are measured in billionths of an inch, turns the age-old matrix/binder/reinforcement recipe for composites into extraordinarily strong and novel concoctions.

What has given Wang and his group reason to be excited in their pursuit of the ultimate composite is something that he calls “bucky paper,” a light-as-air material made from carbon nanotubes, an amazingly strong material developed in the early 1990s. Carbon nanotubes are 250 times stronger than steel and 10 times lighter, by volume.

To build his “papers” Wang uses carbon nanotubes that his research group buys from Richard Smalley, a Nobel Prize-winning Rice University scientist (see sidebar, page 33). The tubes are the main reinforcing ingredient in a resin binder from which the paper is made. The resulting graphite-black papers resemble a one-inch-square piece of textured cotton fabric. They're 50 microns-half the diameter of a human hair-thick and are extremely light.

Last winter, Wang ran the first tests to see how well the nanotubes were dispersed throughout the resin. Wang explained that the dispersion rate measures the percentage of carbon nanotubes that are evenly dispersed throughout the binder-a chief measure of strength and durability. Wang's group chalked up dispersion rates up to 35 percent-about four times that of their competitors.

With those results and more testing on the way, Wang sees the main obstacle ahead as cost. The history of modern composites shows that it often takes awhile for manufacturing processes to become cost-effective enough to take a product to market. Composites made with carbon nanotubes aren't likely to be an exception to the rule any time soon. Right now, a gram of the things-about the weight of a paper clip-costs $500.

“There are a lot of potential applications for these products to be used on a daily basis,” Wang surmises. “The only impediment right now, really, is cost.”

But with its incredible strength-to-weight ratio, carbon nanotubes have caught the fancy of researchers worldwide. It's only a matter of time, Wang believes, before products made with the stuff become widely available and affordable. In fact, he predicts an imminent breakthrough in carbon nanotube manufacturing that will make the process competitive in the marketplace with current materials, including steel.

“Every week you see a news release from Japan, France, Germany-from companies that want to produce several tons of carbon nanotubes a day,” Wang says. “Once the cost issue goes away, the primary concern will be who can make the composite using nanotubes with the kind of loading we want, to produce something that is both useful as reinforcement and can be reliably reproduced. That's what we're working on here.”

Wang sees the introduction of carbon nanotubes into the composite market as a legitimization of nano- composites in the increasingly sexy nanotechnology market. Conservative predictions put the impact of nanotechnology worldwide in the next 15 years at $1 trillion annually. The impact from nanocomposites will comprise more than a third of that total, or about $340 billion, analysts predict.

The difference between the '74 T-Bird and its new-millennium counterpart might be small in comparison to the advances that research like Wang's promises for the future.

Wang picks up a small glass container from a display case a few steps outside his office. Inside is a number of the bucky papers he's made. It's fascinating to think that these objects, which seem to be no heavier than the air inside the jar, could some day turn out to be, ounce for ounce, one of the most valuable substances in the world.

“I think we stand a very good chance of winning the race,” he says. “We're the only people in the world using the bucky papers in this way just now. We are looking squarely at the possibility of a revolutionary moment in composites science.”

If Wang finds what he's looking for, fiberglass would become positively primitive.

PAPER TIGER: Wang's lab specializes in developing what he calls "bucky papers." Reinforced by carbon nanotubes-a powdered, synthetic material that is 250 times as strong as steel yet only a tenth as heavy - the samples shown here are roughly half the thickness of a human hair.