When Dr. Habib Dagher founded the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center in 1996, he was working with a close team in pursuit of the narrow mission of developing next-generation composite materials using bio-based materials.

Now, almost 25 years later, the lab—and its mission—has grown considerably.

“Today, we have 240 people who work in the lab, in a roughly 100,000-square-foot laboratory space, working on over a hundred different projects at any given time, developing materials and structures for over 500 clients across the globe,” Dagher said.

Those clients’ needs span everything from civil construction like bridges, energy structures like wind energy and turbine support—with a particular focus on offshore wind technology—boat building and even space travel applications aimed at helping NASA put people on Mars.

“The theme is structures and materials and how to use structures and materials efficiently in all these different spaces,” Dagher said.

Material change

The lab partners with clients from all these different industries to help develop new material technologies. “The lab is ISO 17025 certified,” Dagher said, “so we also do structural and material testing for clients. Anything we do is typically automatically approved to be used in applications for building codes.”

And if a company doesn’t yet exist to use a new composite material the lab is developing, Dagher said his team will find ways to get it into the market.

“We’ve had a number of companies develop from the lab,” Dagher said. “One of our missions is economic development. So, as we develop new technologies, we’ll either license an existing company to use the technology or spin off a new business to take it to market. If there’s a whole new product line that doesn’t fit into somebody else’s business, we would work to help spin off the business using investors from scratch.”

This diverse client base has led the University of Maine to develop a staggering array of composite materials.

“Composites can be designed for end-use applications,” Dagher said, “so you can tailor the material for what you need. And that’s the advantage of composites—they are materials by design, if you wish. It could be bio-based composites, it could be synthetic resins and fibers, or it could be bio-based resins and fibers. It could be combinations thereof.”