M5 in Overdrive

With its purchase of Magellan Systems, DuPont will accelerate the roll-out of the fabulous M5® super fiber. Soldiers and public safety employees will be the first to benefit.

by James A. Bacon

Chemical giant DuPont has purchased a majority interest in Magellan Systems, Inc., giving it control over Magellan’s M5® fiber, potentially the strongest, toughest, most heat-resistant fiber ever invented. The transaction ensures DuPont’s leadership in the market for high-performance organic fibers for years to come.

Having completed construction of its pilot plant in Chesterfield County, Va., in December, Magellan is ramping up production to between 20 and 60 metric tons of fiber annually. Over the next year or two, the company will focus on refining its manufacturing process and supplying fiber to customers who want to explore potential applications. Commercial production is expected to begin in late 2007 or early 2008.

The Department of Defense, which funded Magellan manufacturing R&D to the tune of , will be a priority customer. Early applications of the M5® fiber are likely to be body armor for soldiers and police, heat-resistant coats for fire fighters, and engineered composites for satellite struts and aircraft wings. Only after meeting those critical markets will the company turn to consumer products such as golf club shafts, bicycle frames and tennis rackets.

“The M5® is the next-generation fiber,” says Fabio Oliveira, DuPont’s global product manager for M5®. “We believe it’s going to complement our product portfolio beautifully.” Rather than replacing DuPont’s venerable Kevlar® and Nomex® fibers, he explains, M5® will add value to them. Depending on the application, M5® could interwoven with other fibers to bolster their performance.

For all of the fiber’s extraordinary potential, though, it still could take years of patient work for M5 to penetrate the marketplace. “Historical experience shows that the time required for development of a new fiber, its associated manufacturing processes, testing, and incorporation into functional composite structure is generally measured in decades,” states a 2005 report by the National Material Advisory Board. “New fibers developed today are not likely to find practical application in the production of DoD systems in the next 10 years.”

That’s why the Magellan-DuPont marriage makes so much sense, comments Gene Winter, senior vice president of the Greater Richmond Partnership, the economic development organization for the Richmond region. DuPont’s Advanced Fiber Systems is located just a few miles down the road from Magellan’s pilot plant. “Instead of building its manufacturing and marketing capabilities from scratch,” Winter says, Magellan can accelerate the development of M5® by tapping DuPont’s extensive engineering expertise and plugging into its global distribution networks.”

Magellan also benefits from being located in one of the world’s leading clusters of high-performance fiber manufacturing and R&D, Winter observes. Besides DuPont, the  Richmond region is home to Honeywell, developer of high-performance Spectra fiber, and a number of other fiber manufacturers. As a result, there’s a large pool of employees, both factory floor-level and managerial level, skilled in specialized fiber-spinning processes.

Development of M5 began more than a decade ago. Dr. Doetze Sikkema, a polymer chemist, conceived the compound’s unique chemical structure while in the employ of Akzo Nobel, a Dutch chemical company. Although Sikkema anticipated tremendous interest in military applications for the fiber, his superiors didn’t share his enthusiasm and told him to direct his talents elsewhere. Sikkema’s discovery might have languished had not Akzo, reinventing itself as a pharmaceutical company, decided to shed non-core assets.

Gene Vetter, CEO of Maryland-based Magellan Systems, was scouring the world for technologies with promising Navy applications when he stumbled across M5. He immediately saw the potential. Vetter acquired Akzo’s technology, hired Sikkema to continue research, began phasing out his technology-consulting business, and transformed Magellan into an enterprise with the sole focus of commercializing and manufacturing M5®fiber. Lining up DuPont as a minority investor and engineering advisor, Vetter built a pilot plant and R&D facility in Chesterfield County, only a few miles from DuPont’s Spruance plant, where Kevlar® and Nomex® are manufactured.

One of the main challenges was to devise a new manufacturing process for working with M5®. The fiber was so strong that the machinery developed to produce Kevlar® wouldn’t stand up under the strain. But with DuPont’s help, Magellan has made the transition from producing lab-scale batches of the fiber to spinning out fiber in a continuous process. The machines still aren’t running at optimal efficiency, though. “Like any embryonic project, a lot of tweaks are needed,” says Anthony R. Farina, a DuPont corporate spokesman. “There’s a lot of work ahead.”

With DuPont as the majority shareholder, Magellan will function now, for all practical purposes, as a subsidiary of the chemical conglomerate. Magellan will work jointly with DuPont to handle manufacturing and R&D, while DuPont’s Advanced Fiber Systems will contribute its formidable sales network and value-added engineering services to develop the market.

Extensive testing has shown M5®to be incredibly strong. What’s more, the fiber shows greater fire resistance than Nomex®, DuPont’s fire-fighting fiber, and it’s superior in other characteristics such as tenacity and stiffness. The fiber doesn’t degrade with exposure to waters, acids or ultra-violet light, and its ability to adhere to resins allows it to be used in composites. Competitors’ fibers may compete on the basis of individual attributes, but none combine all the characteristics of M5®, says Oliveira. “The test data indicate that it will be the best fiber ever made.”

Oliveira’s assessment is confirmed by the Natick Soldier Center in Massachusetts, where much of the research on warfighter armor is conducted. “Although the fiber mechanical properties are less than optimal under current processing conditions, ballistic impact tests of composite materials prepared from (relatively low-strength) M5 fiber were conducted by the U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command,” states the Natick website. “These systems were shown to provide performance almost as good as the best composite materials ever prepared for fragmentation protection.” Natick estimates that certain performance characteristics of M5® will surpass Kevlar® KM2 fabric by 40 percent to 60 percent.

By acquiring control over Magellan and M5, DuPont protects its valuable Kevlar® and Nomex® franchises. The new super-fiber won’t displace the two older fibers, which were discovered in the 1960s, as it might have if owned by a competitor. As William J. Harvey, vice president and general manager of DuPont Advanced Fiber Systems, put it: “The addition of M5® will complement and extend DuPont’s current portfolio of safety and protection innovations and capabilities.”

DuPont won’t be selling M5 as much as it will be selling engineering solutions to meet customers’ performance specs, says Oliveira. “People aren’t saying I want Kevlar, I want M5. … They’re saying I have a need. Can you help me engineer a solution for that?”

For example, someone might want to develop a new braking pad. The customer will rely upon DuPont, which knows more about the performance characteristics of Kevlar®, Nomex® and M5® than anyone else, to help achieve the optimum performance at the optimum price. DuPont engineers will bring to bear the appropriate blend of fibers, along with weaving and laminating technologies, to meet the customers’ needs.

The interest in M5® has been enormous, Oliveira says. “We have several customers contacting us on a daily basis.” Magellan/DuPont won’t be able to supply commercial quantities for another year or two. That’s not what they want to hear, he says, but it does take time to perfect the product and ramp up production. “We’re trying to answer each one of them as openly as we can.”

-- May 25, 2005