The slim profile of a single soldier shimmers into sight. Guns fire on the solitary target, but the bullets appear to have no affect. While the attack continues, the soldier analyzes information about the layout of the battlefield, the position of enemy troops and the status of his broken ankle. This processing takes place on a tiny laser display projected onto his retina by the imaging system built into his helmet visor. Intelligence indicates that his mission goal is to the west, over the rubble of demolished buildings. The soldier commands his body armor to harden around his ankle, creating a stronger cast to protect the injury. With another command, his black armor transforms chameleon-like into a perfect simulation of the concrete and mud covering the battlefield. In a single leap, he is over the ruined buildings.
This imaginary scenario is more like “Starship Troopers” than modern warfare. Although the military uses of science and engineering have improved over the history of warfare, the preceding story is still a dream. However, the dream may not be far from becoming a reality.
The U.S. Army has granted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a five-year, $50 million award to develop an Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. The ISN will work to advance the technology of materials engineering and nano-scale construction in order to equip the armies of the future with gear that can change color, offer protection from chemical attacks and bullets and provide immediate, automated medical care.
MIT was chosen to develop ISN after a team of Army experts unanimously agreed upon MIT for the new center from among a nation-wide pool of universities. Approximately $10 million a year will be provided for basic research, and the school will get nearly $4 million a year for applied research intended to investigate the most promising technologies.
Although the Department of the Army states that the purpose of the ISN is to “improve the ability of the soldier to perform their mission in the battlespace where somebody is actively trying to locate and kill them,” the research results generated by the Institute’s staff will be published in publicly available literature. All patents would remain the property of MIT.
The prefix “nano-” refers to the scale of billionths of meters, where the objects being studied are composed of only a few hundred atoms. Though scientists (and before them, science fiction writers) have wondered for decades about the new properties that might be built into materials and systems constructed atom-by-atom, it is only in recent years that technology has advanced to the point where such speculation has seen practical results.
The ISN has seven areas of focus: Energy Absorbing Materials; Mechanically Active Materials, Devices ‘ Exoskeletons; Signature and Detection Management; Biomaterials and Nanodevices for Soldier Medical Technology; Processing and Characterization of Nanomaterials; and Modeling. The seventh area is concerned with systems integration, and commercial applications of techniques and technologies developed in the other research fields.
The Army will operate in a guidance role, while MIT will directly administer the program. Dr. Thomas Magnanti, MIT’s dean of the engineering program, will be the overall supervisor of the ISN, and professor Edwin Thomas of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, will be the director of the new institute. Dr. William Peters will be the executive director.
Under the expected terms of the contract currently being negotiated, the Army will “establish objectives and provide broad supervisory and policy guidelines” through an executive board and an executive agent at the ISN.
The ISN will be staffed by up to 150 people, including 35 MIT professors. Although the Army does not predict the project will directly generate new jobs for the community, it hopes “the technologies developed by the ISN and the Army will eventually create thousands of jobs in the high tech areas in and around Boston.”
Though the more fantastic applications for nanotechnology may be years away, Thomas expects the ISN to produce some surprising products within the initial five-year contract between MIT and the Army.
Noting that MIT researchers have recently created “world-record actuator materials” that are “better than human muscle,” Thomas described an armor system that might allow soldiers to leap 20-foot walls.
Other potential projects include: clothing impregnated with precisely engineered molecules, fluids that respond to electric charge and polymer actuators that could harden immediately, and become soft again with the flip of a switch. Also on the horizon could be bullet-proof armor — no heavier than ordinary uniforms — that utilizes super-strong materials; uniforms that are able to change color; and microcomputer components that allow a soldier to be connected to online battle information without the need of bulky conventional communications equipment.
The ISN is expected to collaborate closely with the newly created MIT NanoMechanical Technology Lab, as well as MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories. Collaborators such as DuPont, Massachusetts General/Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Raytheon will work closely with the ISN and with the Army Natick Soldier Center and the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Md., to help transform the raw technology from the ISN into field-ready gear.
Timothy Swager, a professor in the MIT Department of Chemistry, was one of the principle architects for the scientific proposal and has been tapped as associate director.
“We are out to generate new research paradigms, try to push the fundamental limits on materials … amazing things can happen when you shrink dimensions down,” Swager said. “You can tie an optical fiber in a knot, but a pane of glass in a window which is much larger cannot take much deformation … that is the difference when you shrink the scale of construction down.”
Swager illustrated the potential of nanotechnology by discussing another MIT project, a polymer actuator being developed by researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Lab. A chunk of polymer gel was able to generate 100 times the contractile force as mammalian skeletal muscle. However, muscles differ from a continuous chunk of polymer in that they are highly structured at nano-scales. Polymer contraction rates depends on ion diffusion throughout the material, so varies with the length squared. Therefore, explained Swager, if a polymer had the intricate architecture that muscle does, the effective length would be 1,000 times smaller, and the strength would increase by a factor of a million.
“Imagine in the mechanical properties world, that we can figure out ways to link polymer chains together at molecular levels and reinforce them with other nanoparticles such that they maintain their flexibility and still have incredibly high strength,” Swager said. “We can use these techniques to build a ‘variable impedance exoskeleton’. Imagine clothing that feels normal, but all at once — on a nanoelectrical stimulus — it becomes as hard as steel.”
According to Swager, the vision of the team that worked to win the INS grant for MIT is to make a “superman suit” that is capable of bouncing bullets while at the same time enhancing the athletic performance of that soldier and also increases the chances of survival in many environments. Swager pointed out that the same equipment could be used just as effectively by firefighters and police officers to decrease injury and death while improving the way these professionals do their jobs.
When asked about a projected timeline for the production of any of these technologies, Swager suggested that he expects a “a number of important scientific breakthroughs that are the enabling foundations for these applications” by the end of the first year.
“We are trying to make very substantial quantum leaps in materials properties,” Swager said. “That is difficult by its very nature to predict. However, we are going to try to save some soldiers lives. We are asking a lot of these people [soldiers], and that is what I want to do. They are protecting our way of life, and they deserve all our effort to protect them.”
Capt. Amy Hannah, a representative with Army Public Affairs, said “ISN’s role is one of basic and applied research.”
Its primary goal is to create an expansive array of nanotechnologies for a wide range of survival situations. It will develop multithreat protection against ballistics, sensory attacks, chemical/biological attacks, climate control, chameleon-like garments, biomedical monitoring and load management systems that through exoskeletons or prostheses will allow increased load capacity. These will enable a revolutionary advance in soldier survivability.
Although both Hannah and Swager state that the lab will not develop offensive weaponry, Hannah said some of the research coming out of the ISN “might be able to be applied that way.”
According to Hannah, private companies and other government agencies will be able to participate in the main goal of the ISN, “innovation.” She suggests that possible innovative technologies might include:
•Semi-permeable membranes with molecular-scale pores that pass water only could be used for water filtration and purification, as well as bio-protective shields.
•Molecular-scale rotors arranged on a three-dimensional grid array could pivot to block high-intensity laser light, acting as “molecular-scale venetian blinds” to prevent laser blinding.
•The use of nano-particles of gold in solution, which are linked by strands of DNA coded to respond to the DNA of specifc biological agents and which produce dramatic optical color-change agents, could allow reliable field detection of biological warfare agents at low sample sizes.
•Super-efficient batteries.
According to Hannah, the list of potential applications of basic nano research grows every day.