SBIR-STTR Award

The US DoD requires robust ways of neutralizing threats posed by hostile powers and terrorist organizations that may be in possession of dangerous weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Unfortunately, the weapons currently available to the DoD do not offer a way for the WMD to be destroyed without risking the spread of that material throughout the area. The strategy for the defeat of biological weapons is to use a nanoenergetic formulation (e.g. thermite) that produces high heat in conjunction with a biocide to destroy residual biological agent in the plume. Recent research into HI3O8 has created interest in the material as one that could be formulated to defeat biological weapons. HI3O8 is not commercially available, and its preparation has been a bottleneck for the development of this material into an ordinance item for WMD defeat. For this material to be successfully incorporated into a weapon system, a process must be developed which provides very consistent composition of product and particle size. The main objective of this effort is to develop a cost-beneficial manufacturing processes for producing kilogram quantities of HI3O8 with high purity and small particle size, as well as identify quality assurance measures for its handling and storage.

Nalas Engineering and Johns Hopkins University collaborated in a Phase I STTR program to study reactive mixtures of HI3O8 and nanocomposite fuels previously developed by the Weihs Group. These fuel/oxidizer mixtures are uniquely able to simultaneously produce heat and biocidal iodine gas, a combination designed to destroy biological weapons. The team at Nalas focused on evaluating conditions for preparing HI3O8 with control over the particle size distribution, while the Weihs Group focused on studying how these fuel/oxidizer mixtures behave in small-scale testing. The results of that Phase I program provide the foundation for developing conditions to prepare high-quality HI3O8 on the kilogram-scale to support ongoing testing, and to develop formulations of this fuel/oxidizer mixture that would be suitable for application to an end item in which this material would be set around an explosive charge. In the Phase II STTR , we will advance the development of these unique fuel/oxidizer materials to kilogram-scale production, formulation on the ten-gram scale, and testing of larger articles to facilitate down-selection to a material that can be carried forward for further development.