UNLV researcher gets grant to help make safer explosives

Thursday, March 3, 2005 | 8:26 a.m.

A UNLV chemistry and physics professor just scored a five-year, $1.5 million contract to test explosives for the Defense Department.

The grant is one of 33 research grants totaling $146.6 million over five years that the Defense Department issued to 27 universities under the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.

Malcolm Nichol, a visiting professor and executive director of UNLV's high pressure science and engineering center, will be studying the chemical make-up of explosives in order to make them safer.

The research will help the Defense and Energy departments design explosives that will not go off if they are accidently dropped or if the carrier is in a collision, Nichol said.

"They (the Army) don't want them to explode when they don't want them to explode," Nichol said.

The goal is to study what defects there may be in the crystals that either make the material more sensitive or less sensitive to changes in pressure, temperature or movement, Nichol said.

Nichol is the principal researcher on the project, but he also will be working with National Science Foundation researcher and UNLV adjunct professor Maija Kukla as well as with investigators at the University of Maryland College Park, the University of South Florida and Vanderbilt University.

The $300,000 a year funding will be divided among the universities with most of it going to pay graduate students and laboratory costs, Nichol said.

Some of Nichol's experiments will be done at UNLV and others will be done through federal partnerships at labs like Argon National Laboratory in Chicago, Nichol said. Most of the tests will use less than a microgram of explosive material, eliminating any chance of the material actually exploding.

Nichol has worked with the military on similar investigations for the last 25 years as part of his general interest in how materials behave at high pressures, he said.