DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711150838

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY AKWELI PARKER, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  200 lines

TECHNOLOGY FOR SALE AT LANGLEY A 34-MEMBER GROUP SCOURS THE RESEARCH CENTER FOR PROJECTS THAT MAY HAVE LUCRATIVE PRIVATE-SECTOR USES.

Joe Heyman slams his fist on a conference-room table at NASA Langley Research Center's sprawling compound. The bespectacled, 33-year NASA veteran says he's steamed that his money-starved employer does such a wimpy job of promoting itself.

``Hubble, in one step, has taken man farther than anything since Galileo,'' Heyman says of the pioneering space telescope, launched by NASA in 1990.

``I'm frustrated that NASA doesn't take credit for that,'' carps Heyman, director of NASA Langley's 3 1/2-year-old Technology Applications Group.

With the passion of a tent revival preacher, Heyman proselytizes that NASA may be the country's future economic salvation as global competition puts the squeeze on U.S. businesses.

But first the organization must do a little more chest-thumping to let the public know that it's open for business, says Heyman.

For him and TAG's employees, sharing Langley's wealth of technology with business is a religion. Instead of saving souls, TAG's mission is to bring about sales. Specifically, it seeks to hammer out licensing agreements with the private sector so that business can profit from NASA-developed technologies.

TAG employees see it as one of the clearest examples of how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration earns its $13.8 billion annual keep from taxpayers.

Agencywide, many fear that Congress will look at the leaner NASA's recent success on a smaller budget and decide that it can withstand even more belt tightening.

That would be a mistake, say folks like Heyman.

``NASA is an investment in America's future - I firmly believe that,'' he says. Projects like the proposed High Speed Civil Transport, a next-generation supersonic jetliner, could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues.

``How many people realize,'' Heyman asks, ``that the computer industry came from NASA's need (during the space race) to miniaturize?''

Within a year, Heyman predicts TAG will impact $1 billion in U.S. sales - a number he concedes is a lofty goal, but realistic ``if several things go right.''

The numbers seem to indicate the group is getting somewhere. In 1993, NASA Langley counted 32 memoranda of agreement or memoranda of understanding - legal documents setting the terms of a business relationship - with companies. Since TAG's formation in 1994, those numbers have steadily risen. An exception was fiscal year '97, which observers say could be attributed to a drop in funding as a result of government downsizing.

For a long time, NASA used feats such as landing on the moon or finishing projects on time as yardsticks of agency performance. But the federal budget squeeze has forced all federal agencies to prove their value to taxpayers and the politicians who vote on funding.

At NASA Langley, it's meant a greater emphasis on research with ``real-life'' applications and when possible, tailoring it to meet the needs of business.

In the past, ``technical superiority was an end in and of itself,'' says Preston Carraway III, TAG deputy director. Now, NASA management tosses around words like ``practicality'' and ``accountability.''

``Now,'' says Carraway, ``it's relevance.''

With about 35 employees, TAG scours the ???-employee Langley campus for research projects that it considers the most commercially viable. It even maintains an in-house team of patent attorneys to slog through the inevitable legal issues that arise when transferring Uncle Sam's technology to business.

Rosa Webster sits on TAG's Technology Transfer Team. Called T3's, these engineers-turned salespeople shepherd a technology from its development in the lab through licensing and manufacture of the end-product. They specialize in market sectors like manufacturing materials, software and medical sensors.

Though knowledgeable about high-tech subjects, T3's are anything but your typical shove-the-pizza-under-the-door lab rats. They need people skills, says Webster, since they act as liaisons between researchers and the business people interested in their technologies.

``We serve as sort of like a marriage broker,'' says Webster. ``The whole idea is to impact the bottom line of industry.''

TAG's tech transfer agents are hand-picked for their ability to interact with non-scientists as well as for their attitudes regarding the changes sweeping the agency - changes that haven't been embraced by everyone.

``We're remaking ourselves,'' says Webster. ``And there will be some dead bodies along the way'' - a reference to old-school NASA workers who grew comfortable with the highly structured, if somewhat bureaucratic, NASA of a few years ago.

Webster took the wheel on licensing ``carbon-carbon,'' a composite designed to protect pistons from the performance-robbing heat found in race-car engines.

Carbon-carbon retains its strength at 3,000 degrees centigrade, whereas traditional aluminum pistons begin to soften at 300 degrees. Carbon-carbon pistons also are lighter and expand less than aluminum. Hence, they're more powerful, fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly.

The most immediate beneficiaries will probably be Formula One racers in Europe, says Doug Wilson, vice president-research and development for carbon-carbon licensee Hitco Technologies in Gardena, Calif.

``These are the guys who would cut their arm off for a gram or two savings,'' says Wilson.

But once the technology is perfected, it could be applied to truck engines, unmanned aerial vehicles for the military, chainsaws and more.

``We've enjoyed the discussions with NASA,'' says Wilson, but he adds that the relationship hasn't been a free ride - Hitco has a lot more research and development to do before the technology is ready for the marketplace.

``They probably did 5 percent worth, and we have to do 95 percent more before making a sale.''

Partially as a result of recent leaps in computing power and in part because of changes in the tech-transfer process, Langley is churning out more new doodads than ever. The center leads the agency with 25 percent of NASA's patents - NASA has 10 field centers like Langley nationwide. And more gadgetry is on the way.

Inside Langley's Electronic Technology Transfer building, scientists Robert Fox and Clayton ??? are huddled over a cubish container no bigger than a box of tissues. In the box, they say, is a gizmo that could generate sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Thin Layer Composite Unimorph Piezoelectric Driver and Sensor - called ``Thunder'' for short, is a sandwich of aluminum foil, adhesive and ceramic that some scientists are hyping as the next ``sliced bread.''

Thunder moves when a voltage is applied and produces electricity when mechanically moved. While not a new concept, Thunder blows away the performance of previous ``piezoelectric'' devices, which are used in alarm clocks, pagers and a vast number of industrial applications.

Langley scientists say Thunder will have many more uses - like hushing jet engines so that from a few hundred feet away a plane's roar might sound only like mild whoosh.

For jobs like spaceflight, where weight and room come at a hefty premium, Thunder's promised properties are an engineer's dream. As a composite material, it's light and strong, whereas traditional piezos shatter easily. Thunder delivers a greater amount of displacement, or movement for a given amount of voltage, than the old stuff - so it requires less power.

But Thunder scientists get charged up the most about their creation's wide range of possible earthly applications.

Vibrated at low frequencies, Thunder is ideal for use as a switch or pump. At higher frequencies, researchers say it will counteract the airflow disturbances, hence the noise, in engines, noisy rooms or wherever quiet is desired. ``You could have a gasoline-powered lawnmower and think you were using an electric,'' says Fox. He adds, ``it'll be all over your automobile.''

The technology so impressed the staff of Research & Development magazine that in 1996 they conferred upon it their technology of the year award in their annual R&D 100 competition.

Up to 200 people at NASA Langley work on Thunder or Thunder-related activities.

A number of companies have expressed interest, including FACE Technologies and ``a very large Virginia company'' which have signed or are in the process of signing agreements to use Thunder under license.

Langley's research labs are like a techno-geek's toy shop. In one, senior engineer Pete LeBel works on a sensor that detects environmental or industrial gases using tiny lasers.

LeBel says a utility could ``take a small plane equipped with this instrument and fly over a natural gas pipeline,'' instead of the labor-intensive method used today: sending guys out on foot to inspect pipelines for leaks, even in the remotest areas.

In another lab, strewn with cables, oscilloscopes and high-tech testing equipment, engineer John Simpson fiddles with a portable ``eddycurrent flow'' detector. Using a magnetic field, the handheld device beeps when it finds a crack - like say in a fatigued airplane wing. It improves on previous eddycurrent detectors that were bulky, awkward and practically required an engineering degree to operate.

Not so with Simpson's testbed. ``I could give it to you and say, `If you hear that thing beep, let me know.' ''

``That's the instruction manual,'' he says, pointing to a laminated yellow sheet not much larger than a business card.

The advantage to business - airline companies save money by not having to train mechanics as intensively as they would with older, more complex devices.

Nonetheless, each year there's the chance that some of the center's gee-whiz projects will fall under what NASA bean counters call ``non-funded categories'': work that hasn't made it into next year's budget. For researchers who've dedicated their lives to science, having one's work - and sometimes one's job - deemed ``nonessential'' by the brass carries a heavy emotional and financial toll.

``It's not that they're not doing high-quality work,'' says Rosemary Rallo-Baize, an aerospace engineer with TAG. But, she explains, the center and the agency will be forced to make tough decisions as Congress exhorts federal agencies to buckle down in the effort to balance the budget by 2002.

TAG will probably get to breathe a collective sigh of relief this year, as it appears sufficient money will come through.

``We're just about able to fully fund all the commercialization projects we wanted to,'' says Rallo-Baize.

Not everybody thinks that's a good thing.

The Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, opposes the use of tax dollars to assist industry, a process some critics call ``corporate welfare.''

``If all federal assistance to business were purged from the budget, the budget deficit could be cut in half,'' wrote Cato analysts Stephen Moore and Dean Stansel in their report ``How Corporate Welfare Won: Clinton and Congress Retreat from Cutting Business Subsidies.''

But canning NASA research has implications beyond saving a few billion bucks or putting a few rocket scientists out of work, Heyman says. It could mean shutting the door on breakthrough discoveries before they're made.

Heyman uses both hands to push a piece of paper on the table into an arch, mimicking the motion of a Thunder wafer.

``This can be a pump, it can be a heart,'' Heyman says, holding his hands to a make-believe artificial heart on his chest.

``You don't know. But hey, this is what research is about.'' MEMO: For information on NASA's technology transfer and

commercialization assistance, point your Web browser to the NASA

Commercial Technology Network at (http://nctn.hq.nasa.gov). ILLUSTRATION: BETH BERGMAN NAKAMURA

The Virginian-Pilot

Phillip H. Glaude runs the Carbon Lab at NASA Langley, where

"carbon-carbon" research is showing promise of generating revenue.

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