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.

The Department of Defense, which funded Magellan manufacturing R&D to the tune of $7 million in 2004, 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.” More

To the uninitiated, the behavior of the water droplet might sound like a curiosity--an interesting quirk of nature--but of questionable significance. But to Makal and Wynne, it was an unprecedented phenomenon. Says Wynne: “I’ve never seen anything like this in my career. … Most people work an entire lifetime in the polymer materials without making a discovery this important.”

Writing in the chemical journal Langmuir, Wynne and Makal proposed that when water touches the material, the polymer side chain undergoes a thermodynamically driven rearrangement, exposing the hydrophobic fluorine-containing groups to the surface and causing them to repel water. The effect is completely reversible, Wynne notes, by drying the surface.

DuPont has signed a multi-year agreement to outfit agents of the United States Custom and Border Protection Border with protective vests containing new DuPont Kevlar Comfort XLT technology. The latest Kevlar innovation, Comfort XLT technology, allows vests to weigh at least 25 percent lighter than current all-aramid fabric designs while maintaining the same high levels of ballistic performance.