URI awarded explosives research grant

10/23/08 - Last week, the University of Rhode Island officially established a Center of Excellence in Explosives Research using a $5.15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This does not mean, however, resident students will be woken up by any explosions, other than the occasional football cannon.

Center Co-Director Jimmie Oxley stressed the center will not conduct on-site testing of explosive materials. Instead, the chemistry professor explained the center provides a great opportunity for students in many different majors to gain unique experience by doing research.

"There are 2.3 million jobs in homeland security-related fields," she said.

The Department of Homeland Security selected URI for the center after a rigorous and competitive selection process. The department started with 400 proposal entries, whittled them down to three and after another, much longer and more detailed proposal entry, chose URI for the grant.

Oxley said chemistry and forensics are not the only departments involved with the center. The center will research materials that could be made into a bomb. She said this is the area where the center has the most leeway to branch out to other disciplines, as this also entails detecting potential bombers as well as bombs.

"Homeland Security in general is very interested in what I would call the soft sciences," Oxley said. "They're interested in what you might call profiling, so all these folks in psychology may have a role to play."

She added it was this kind of "soft science" that led to the arrest of Steven Nobles. Last week, Nobles tried to bring a pipe bomb, along with fireworks and other weapons, onto an airplane headed for Las Vegas. She said it was certain characteristics about the man that led authorities to perform an additional security screening, in which they found the contraband.

"We're not doing that [yet, but] Homeland Security has groups [researching] that," Oxley said. "When we were making our proposal, we couldn't find a URI professor per se that was interested in working with us, but now that we've won the proposal we may find some [psychology professors]."

Oxley said she did not know what signals or traits the man was giving off to alert authorities to the presence of a potential threat, but according to the Oct. 17 Associated Press article, Nobles came to court dressed in "a black T-shirt depicting a machine gun and green glow-in-the-dark skulls."

The center will also study how to detect bombs already made before they go off and how to deal with the violent effects if an explosion does occur.

The mechanical engineering department is involved in the latter part of the center's mission, also called blast mitigation, in which researchers simulate explosions to see how certain materials react to certain stressors. Through this, it can develop explosive-resistant materials.

Professor Arun Shukla, chair of URI's mechanical engineering project, is in charge of directing research for this purpose.

"There are various aspects that we'll work on, one is to look at new [building] materials that can be used for mitigation purposes," he said. "In our research we want to subject these new materials to controlled experiments. We will subject them to blast loading here, and see how they respond."

These new materials vary in construction, but Shukla said they could be anything from a composite material, an example of which can be a "sandwich" of hard foam between two sheets of plastic glass, to a spray-on or painted-on coating.

To look at how these materials stand up to high-speed collisions, the department has a high-speed camera. This camera, Shukla said, takes pictures at a rate 200 million frames per second, but can only photograph 16 frames at a time. This means the margin for error in timing these experiments is in the milliseconds, so precision is vital.

There are three professors researching the three types of damage caused by explosives. Shukla is responsible for the air blast to solid interaction; his research basically involves shooting a very powerful compressed air gun at experimental materials. Professor Hamouda Ghonem deals with temperature and fire interactions and professor Carl-Ernst Rousseau researches how shrapnel can interact with these materials.

"When a shrapnel hits [a building], you're going to have stress that will propagate in the material," Rousseau said. "My goal is to prevent the effects of that stress."

Ghonem's research involves creating materials that resist the effects of heat, in order to prevent key load bearing structures in a building from weakening or collapsing completely. He cited the collapse of the Twin Towers that engineers later blamed on the heat from the fire as an example of what his research is supposed to prevent.