Making Stealth Paint for Aircraft

Greetings from the Australian National University where Alan W. Weimer from the Colorado Centre for Biorefining and Biofuels,, University of Colorado  is speaking on "Lab Curiosity to Commercial Process- what it takes". He started by talking about his experience of working on how to create boron carbide in industrial quantities. Alan commented on the problem of working with "white glove scientists" who concentrated on the purity of the final product, not the cost of the production process. The key to an efficient process was rapid heating. The problem was to produce a reactor vessel which could tolerate the high temperature. The solution was a transport flow, where the particles fall through a gas. However, the problem then was to find a market large enough to justify using the process. A new market was found in cutting tools for electronics production. Alan then changed topics and discussed the coating of particles with anti-corrosion materials for use on stealth aircraft.