Advanced Composition Investor to manufacture wood product developed at UM center

Habib Dagher is just giddy these days, even more than usual for the man who is a passionate advocate for increased investment in research and development as a conduit to a better economy.

For the good part of a decade, the director of the University of Maine’s Advanced Engineered Wood Composite Center has touted that, given a chance – and millions of dollars in funding – laboratories such as his could conceptualize and create new or improved products.

And, Dagher has said that, given the time, scientists such as he would convince investors to set up businesses that incorporate the research in profitable, job-producing ways. Simply put, he believed researchers could provide the return on the investment that was promised when state and federal governments handed over the funding checks.

Now, the moment has arrived for Dagher to proudly put on display the investor who has signed on to mass manufacture one of the products developed in his Orono laboratory. It is the first company to be formed to use exclusively his center’s innovations, and Dagher couldn’t be happier.

Just who that multimillion-dollar investor is, no one will say just yet. That would take away from the pageantry that is due people who have worked hard over the years to come up with different ways to find more value in Maine’s forests.

The name will be revealed Monday, however, when the University of Maine is scheduled to make an announcement regarding the new business that will manufacture and market a product developed at the wood composite center. The university also will reveal how many jobs will be created by the new business and how much the workers will be paid.

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and Rep. John Baldacci, who have helped secure federal research funds for the center, are expected to attend the event, which will begin at 10 a.m. at Norumbega Hall in downtown Bangor.

University President Peter S. Hoff and Bangor Mayor Michael R. Crowley, in a statement released this week to draw media attention to the event, called Monday “a very important day for Maine’s research and development community, for Maine’s forest products industry, and for Maine’s economy.”

After the Bangor announcement, Dagher will be giving tours of the wood composite center. He loves doing that, especially if it means his enthusiasm will brush off onto others and lead to even more word-of-mouth promotion of the laboratory he calls “world class.”

The center is a 32,000-square-foot playground for scientists and researchers who come up with products that often cause casual observers to say, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense.”

On a recent tour, Dagher explained how various types of wood, including hemlock and red maple, are chopped into pieces and then mixed with glues, fiber-reinforced polymers or other materials to form prototypes of construction materials for homes, decks, industrial settings, bridges and piers. The innovations can be used in homes and exteriors in just about every environment, from frigid northern Maine to steamy Southern states.

The oversized room echoes with the sounds of hydraulic equipment testing the fatigue levels of bridge-length beams. The noise resembled the sound of trucks traveling over interstate bridges during a 50-year time period. The beams are jostled about, then broken and tested to see if they became weaker after 50 years of wear.

They don’t, Dagher proclaimed.

Dagher summed up the center’s research in one sentence – “We believe there’s a future in materials that won’t rot in the future and that are made of wood.”

He explained technologies and experiments in simple terms that even a child could understand. The many interconnected pieces of equipment look like Erector sets that children and teens have been playing with for years, only bigger and more expensive. Tremendous concrete blocks resembling Legos are stacked atop each other and are used to test the strengths of glue-laminated wood beams when they are put under the strain of hurricane- or earthquakelike conditions. A 10-ton crane sits at least 30 feet in the air, perched on a pair of glue-laminated beams, of course.

The product that will be manufactured at the soon-to-be-announced business is a beam constructed of glue-laminated wood. Small pieces of wood are glued and compressed into planks, and the planks are layered and glued into beams that are twice the strength of even the highest-quality sawed timber. Then a sheet of fiber-enforced polymers is applied to the beam’s underside, again doubling the beam’s strength, according to Dagher.

The university received two patents for the technology that’s used to make the beams – one patent for the formula for fiber-reinforced polymers and the other patent for the process of bonding the polymers to the laminated wood beams.

Beams of this nature were used in the construction of the municipal pier in Milbridge, which was completed early in the summer of 2001. The U.S. Coast Guard, too, is interested in the materials to improve the durability and longevity of its piers and bulkhead docks. At the end of the week, Congress was close to approving $1 million in funding for the center to continue its development of supports for Coast Guard facilities.

What’s being developed at the Advanced Engineered Wood Composite Center are products and technologies that transcend everyday life. There are 2-by-4 studs for outdoor decks, mostly composed of minuscule wood composites held together by polymer material. The beauty of the decking is that it doesn’t have to be painted or stained and it doesn’t splinter. But even though it’s made in three shades, like all-wood decking, it eventually turns gray in color. Dagher said that’s his next project – to make the deck studs fade-resistant. The decking already is being commercially produced and sold by CorrectDeck in Biddeford.

In another part of the center, researchers are coming up with ways so that wood composite panels used in housing are not ripped off their nails during hurricanes. Four-by-8-foot wood composite panels are being fitted with strips of 1-inch-wide plastic material where the nails would be applied. When the strand boards are nailed to a house, the nails go through the plastic and purportedly help better secure the panels to the wood studs.

Dagher’s basic premise for the experiments is simple: “How do you keep the roof on and how do you keep the walls together?

“It’s not that we don’t know how to build good homes,” said Dagher, about his experiments in improving the quality of materials used to construct houses and buildings. “We just don’t know how to build them correctly. We believe there is an opportunity to build disaster-resistant boards.”

Even though his primary objective is to develop better products, Dagher will step back from that and say that new jobs ideally are the end result of all the research that takes place in Orono.

Research and development – R&D as it’s typically called – is a business in itself, and the wood composite center employs 22 full-time professionals and more than 100 University of Maine student researchers. The center’s expenses, including its payroll, are paid from the more than $20 million in research funding that has come from private out-of-state companies or the federal government. Six percent of the center’s funding is from the university.

“Research jobs are just as important as manufacturing jobs,” Dagher said.

And research jobs eventually lead to manufacturing jobs, and that’s what makes Monday’s announcement a sweet one for Dagher, the University of Maine and the city of Bangor.

“The transfer of technology developed at the university into a commercial production facility is a great example of the potential to create jobs as a result of research and development investments,” said Hoff and Crowley, in a statement.