By Holly Baker

A team of FAA scientists has patented and licensed a product that will enable private industry to more quickly create new ultra fire-resistant materials that could dramatically increase aircraft cabin safety.

Richard E. Lyon, Ph.D., manager of the FAA’s Fire Research Program, based at the Technical Center, developed the microscale combustion calorimeter with Richard N. Walters, an FAA research chemist, and Dr. Stanislav I. Stoliarov of SRA International.

The Technical Center was presented the Federal Laboratory Consortium, Northeast Region, 2006 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award for this group’s impressive achievement, in the fall. The specific technology transfer cited in the award is the “Microscale Combustion Calorimetric Analysis of Polymers and for Milligram Samples.”

“This technology has tremendous potential to save lives in many different environments by measuring the heat released by burning materials in a fire,” said Deborah Germak, FAA Technology Transfer program manager.

The microscale combustion calorimeter was the first laboratory (milligram) scale test created to assess fire properties of various materials. It determines how the materials are expected to burn by using minute samples and conditions that simulate burning. The calorimeter provides quantitative results in minutes instead of the hours it takes for other testing methods.

The FAA has already signed three licensing agreements for the calorimeter, marking the first time an FAA technology developed in a federal laboratory was transferred to the commercial market under the agency’s Technology Transfer Program.

The agency can now start to receive its first-ever royalty stream. Technology transfer legislation provides for inventors to receive up to $150,000 per year from these royalties, above their salaries. The federal laboratory, in this case the Technical Center, gets the rest of the royalty money.

Other patents obtained by Dr. Lyon, a polymer engineer, include a microscale combustion calorimeter, in 1991; a heat release rate calorimeter for milligram samples, in 2002; and a flammability tester, application submitted in 2005 (a patent award is in process).

Dr. Lyon, a polymer engineer, focuses his current FAA research on developing new polymers, material models for fire response, and improved test methods and analyses for fire hazard assessments. Before joining the FAA in 1993, he was a materials research engineer at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has published more than 50 journal articles and book chapters on the physics, chemistry, mechanics and flammability of polymers and their composites. He holds masters and doctoral degrees in polymer science and engineering, and a bachelor’s degree in chemical oceanography, all from the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst, MA.