Monday, January 23, 2006

Bring it on, Mother Nature

Bring it on, Mother Nature Local firm's product may help buildings weather quakes

TEYA VITU

Tucson Citizen

A Tucson company has invented the technology that can make buildings more able to survive bomb blasts, stand up to hurricanes and earthquakes or simply keep from crumbling from age.

HJ3 Composite Technologies specializes in structural reinforcements using carbon fiber and a unique polymer epoxy, which serves as both glue and strengthening agent.

What can you do with this stuff?

HJ3 has found the obvious: Plaster it on walls or wrap it around columns.

Then there are the more creative ideas: Incorporate the composite material into New Orleans' levees or stuff it into hollow street light poles to keep them from breaking.

"With this material we can do amazing things," said Hamid Saadatmanesh, HJ3's co-founder and a civil engineer at the University of Arizona. "We can solve problems that conventional materials cannot do. We can make a building that will not fall in an earthquake."

HJ3's carbon fiber composite does in one-eighth-of-an-inch thickness what would take one-quarter inch of much heavier steel plate or 6 inches of concrete, Saadatmanesh said.

Beyond the innovation that intrigues the Department of Defense, HJ3, 4100 S. Fremont Ave., is a South Side company that taps into the very core of Tucson's potential high-tech future.

The company was spawned from technology Saadatmanesh created in his UA lab and got permission to commercialize through the UA Office of Technology Transfer.

Two graduates and the former associate director from the No. 2 ranked McGuire Entrepreneurship Program at UA's Eller College of Management created the business structure around the carbon fiber-polymer concept.

Often, the weak link at high-tech businesses is scientists running their own business, which makes collaboration between the Eller business school and UA's scientific colleges ideal, said Pat Jones, director of the technology transfer office.

"What HJ3 does is wrap all the engineering about a technology developed at UA" that had no obvious use, Jones said. "This is an example of what can be done with engineering at the university."

It's also an example of how entrepreneurship program graduates can hit the ground running, said Sherry Hoskinson, the program's director.

"They become the poster child of the entrepreneurship program," Hoskinson said of Jim Butler and Jeff Hursh, McGuire graduates. "They are one of the great all-time teams," The two joined with John Nighswander, who left the Eller faculty, to launch the company.

Four years later, the company has 12 employees - all focused on research and development or sales and marketing. Carbon fiber and polymer production are contracted out - for now.

Within two years, HJ3 plans to start mixing the polymer in-house and perhaps in four to five years manufacture the carbon fiber mesh, Butler said.

He believes the company could have 200 to 300 employees in five years or less and move from its present 4,600-square-foot office to a 30,000- to 50,000-square-foot facility.

The core of HJ3's product is carbon fiber. Depending on the job specifics, engineers determine how thick to make the carbon fibers and how to orient them.

HJ3 also develops the primer coat, tack coat and the polymer epoxy - all of which serve to attach the carbon fiber to the surface as well as harden and strengthen the composite material, Butler said.

The HJ3 product withstood a 212-pound bomb blast a few months ago at the New Mexico Tech Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center in Socorro, which qualifies the Tucson company to apply for Department of Defense or Army Corps of Engineers jobs, Butler said.

The company will pursue landing a Corps of Engineers job to incorporate its carbon fiber composite into the levee restoration jobs in New Orleans. Butler also believes HJ3 could be used as airports possibly build bomb-proof rooms.

HJ3 generally supplies more mundane projects.

The company recently finished applying its wrap to the 1930s brick facade of the Compass Bank at 120 N. Stone Ave. and wrapping four corroding concrete columns at the Pima County wastewater treatment plant on Roger Road.

"HJ3 is a great product," said Bob Brown, owner of Arizona Repair Masons and Arizona Ram Jack in Phoenix, which did the treatment plant job. "What's good about working with Hamid is he's one of the world's top authorities. I can back up my claims with something other than hyperbole."

Saadatmanesh previously owned and co-developed the technology of the HJ3 competitor, QuakeWrap. Either HJ3 or QuakeWrap would have worked for the Compass Bank job, said Karen Siegle, project manager at Ollanik Construction, 4950 N. Fort Verde Trail, which did the facade work at the bank.

"The reason we used it was it was available and they were quick to respond and had an installer to put it up," Siegle said. "Theirs was used because of response."