Background

A key objective of the Department of Energy’s funding of research projects is the eventual commercialization of the findings generated by the researchers. This is not only a useful tool for considering the value of a project in the inception phase, but it also gives industry an incentive to participate with their own funding. As such, the plan for my project includes performing a pilot-scale production run of the materials and methods that we produced in the lab to validate the commercial feasibility therein. Our nylon-based precursor is the most developed and successful, so our first pilot-scale production run involved melt-spinning several recipes into fibers at a contractor’s test facility in West Melbourne, Florida. The contractor, Hills, Inc., is an industry leader in polymer spinning technologies, and they had the perfect equipment to achieve our goals. I attended this production run as a representative of our UVa team, and I joined representatives from Solvay and the DoE at the facility.

The Marathon to Florida

Flying direct to Orlando from Washington DC and driving an hour to West Melbourne in a rental car was much cheaper than flying to West Melbourne’s airport or out of Charlottesville, so we hit the road for DC in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday. When I say “we”, I mean Laura and Ruby and me! Rather than staying home alone, Laura and Ruby stayed with Laura’s parents who live only 15 minutes from Dulles International Airport. All expenses were spared to make this trip with as little financial impact as possible, so I departed from IAD at 10:20pm. Some maintenance documentation issues and weather delayed the flight slightly, and we landed in Orlando at 12:45pm. I booked a room at the Hyatt in the Orlando airport, so I was mercifully in bed and asleep by 1:30am. My alarm rang at 6am, and I headed back down to the terminal for a quick breakfast on my way to pick up the rental car. I drove straight to Hills, Inc. and arrived precisely at 8:30am, our scheduled start time.

The Spin Trial

For the next two days I was a guest of the wonderful employees of Hills, Inc. Their facility, which is rapidly becoming a campus, is made up of several unassuming steel buildings in a light industrial area of West Melbourne not too far from interstate 95. The company, founded in 1971, is an industry leader and innovator in the field of fiber extrusion. Their patent portfolio is quite impressive, and their expertise was on display over the course of my visit. Working with their friendly and hospitable staff was very easy; with their guidance we completed all of our planned production runs in the first day! Since we had the time and materials, we developed a second set of prototype fibers and ran those on the second day. They shared optical and scanning electron microscope images with us during production to verify that they were delivering what we expected, and everyone from their technicians to their engineers were willing to answer questions throughout the day. I learned a lot during this process, and I’m excited to see how the fibers that were produced perform in our subsequent treatment and conversion processes.

Takeaways

First and foremost, Hills, Inc. was a pleasure to work with and I hope I have the opportunity to collaborate with them again someday in the near future. Additionally, I came away with a bevy of ideas for improvements I’d like make to our lab-scale melt-spinning system. In the coming months I hope to:

• Increase the fiber take-up rate from 150 m/min to a more standard 1500 m/min

• Raise the extruder to increase the distance between the nozzle and spool (theirs are separated by 10 feet!)

• Install a fume evacuator near the nozzle to pull out extrusion fumes

• Build or buy an aspirator gun for guiding the fibers in the spin line prior to spooling the fibers

  • This is a big one because it would give me the opportunity to route the fibers around idlers and through forthcoming test-sections of the spinline that will give me valuable data

• Design and build a laminar flow air quench section to rapidly cool the extruded fiber and add another tuning variable to the spinline

All in all, my first travel to perform research activities was a decided success. I sincerely enjoyed working with Hills, Inc. as well as members from Solvay who are collaborating on this project. I have great expectations for the fibers we created and am looking forward to reporting on our findings in the near future!