Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., visited NASA's Langley Research Center Monday to get a progress update on NASA's Advanced Composites Project (ACP) and a first-hand look at some of the advanced composites work taking place in the Structures and Materials Lab.

The senator's visit comes following the passage of the 2014 appropriations bill in January. That bill allotted $25 million toward the ACP, an initiative by NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) to cut the amount of time it takes to get advanced composites from development and certification to the market. NASA Langley is lead center on the project.

NASA Langley researcher Chauncey Wu, left, talks to Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., about advanced composite structures at the center's Structures and Materials Lab.

Image Credit: NASA/David C. Bowman

Rick Young, left, briefs Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., on the Advanced Composites Project. Young is the project manager for the NASA initiative, which aims to cut the amount of time it takes to get advanced composites from development and certification to the market.

Image Credit: NASA/David C. Bowman

From the planning stages, Warner has been a big supporter of the ACP. He reinforced his commitment on Monday.

"If you think about 30 years ago, Silicon Valley in Northern California kind of carved out the brand that they were the information technology capitol for the world," he said. "Composites have the potential, with all their applications, to be a huge industry. We'd like to make Hampton Roads the Silicon Valley of composites."

Rick Young, the project manager for the ACP, briefed Warner on the current state of the composite materials technology, noting that it currently takes approximately 20 years to get composites through the design, testing and manufacturing stages.

"The goal of our program really is to focus on how quickly we can turn out products using existing materials with reduction in this timeline for development by at least 30 percent," he said.

Young said the ACP is focusing its attention on three key areas to help compress that timeline: predictive capability, rapid inspection and enhanced manufacturing.

And NASA isn't without help in doing that. In September of 2013, NASA announced that it had selected six companies from five states to partner in the Advanced Composites Project: Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. of Ft. Worth, Texas; GE Aviation of Cincinnati, Ohio; Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, Calif.; Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems of Redondo, Beach, Calif.; Boeing Research & Technology of St. Louis, Mo.; United Technologies Corporation and subsidiary Pratt & Whitney of Hartford, Conn.

The six partners were chosen for their technical expertise, willingness and ability to share in costs, certification experience with government agencies, focused technology areas and partnership histories.

Warner stayed engaged throughout the presentations by Young and researchers Brian Stewart and Chauncey Wu, peppering them and NASA Langley's acting Center Director Steve Jurczyk with questions.

In addition to the project overview, engineers briefed Warner on the Integrated Structural Assembly of Advanced Composites (ISAAC), a robot that will be used to develop advanced composite materials, processes, structural concepts, manufacturing and inspection techniques.

Wu then directed Warner to a load-testing machine that technicians had set up to crush an advanced composite cylinder. Pushing from the bottom up, like a can-crusher, the machine broke the cylinder after applying about 30,000 pounds of force. The resulting crack sounded like a rifle shot. Researchers analyze data from tests like this to better understand how to improve the performance of composite structures as well as validate physics-based modeling and simulations.

Use of composite materials like the one crushed in the load-testing machine is on the rise in commercial aviation, an industry that's looking for ways to build lighter, more fuel-efficient aircraft. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which first went into service in 2011, was the world's first major airliner to primarily use composite materials in the construction of its airframe, giving it, according to the company, 20 percent more fuel efficiency than the 767, the aircraft it was built to eventually replace.

Warner says he wants to ensure that NASA Langley, and the Hampton Roads area, is at the epicenter of the industry.

"My hope is that we'll do the design, the development and testing, and then actual manufacturing here in this region," he said. "That would be great news as we think about how we continue to diversify our economy across this region."

Jurczyk thinks NASA and its partners are up to the task.

"I think we're poised to really kind of make the next leap by taking advantage of advancements in other fields and really to shrink the time to market — for industry — to develop systems using composite materials," he said.

He also believes that NASA Langley's expertise is critical to the mission.

"We develop materials in general that are high strength, low weight and have to survive in extreme environments — like high temperature and low temperature," he said. "So composite materials and materials in general, we transition those to industry on a regular basis. This is another opportunity to advance that transition into composite materials and we're really excited about the opportunity."