MAINSTREAM ENGINEERING CORP — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: CBD202-001

Description

A wide range of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) represent a significant threat to life due to their high level of toxicity. Current military chemical-biological (CB) suits use activated carbon as the adsorbent. This layer, while a good adsorbent, does not reactively destroy the CWA. For improved performance, there is a desire to integrate a reactive component to actively decompose CWAs. Metal-organic framework (MOF) materials have shown promise for detoxification. However, incorporation of the MOFs represents a significant challenge due their small particle size and tendency to be deactivated when fabricated into large active beads. Mainstream proposes to use a highly scalable, tunable polymer processing approach to fabricate highly reproducible MOF-polymer beads that can easily be incorporated into standard PPE. In Phase I, Mainstream will demonstrate the ability to control the bead size and solids loading, activity of beads of various sizes, and scalability of the process. The Phase I will culminate in a design of the scalable, continuous production process for the MOF-polymer beads to be built in Phase II. This will ultimately result in the delivery of unpackaged and packaged beads for testing in a relevant operational environment (TRL 6) in Phase II.