Mass High Tech - March 5, 2006

Defense wins put sales on pace to double for composite maker Kazak
By Dianne Claydon

Kazak Composites Inc. of Woburn, a maker of composite components for anything from navy vessels to spacecraft to collapsible buildings, won a patent earlier this year for a new wing system to help missiles fly for longer periods at greater ranges.

The patent is merely the latest win for the company, whose sales are “expected to more than double to greater than $10 million” for fiscal 2006, according to John Fanucci, president of Kazak.

Fanucci said Kazak also won a production contract recently that hadn’t been disclosed publicly for a U.S. Navy ship component that had been SBIR-funded. He declined to disclose the amount or the customer, but said it would double the company’s revenue.

Kazak has won more than 50 SBIR grants — with Phase 2 awards ranging from $500,000 to $2 million, Fanucci said.

The company, established in 1992, has nine patents, with 20 more pending.
Fanucci said the wing system has an outer airfoil with a second wing stored inside it that extends after launch.

“It comes out of the far end of the wing to make it longer — and longer, thinner wings give you longer duration and range,” Fanucci said.

The U.S. Navy uses composite components such as those Kazak makes for a variety of applications, including large hull structures, deckhouses, submarine components, stanchions, special forces small craft and others, according to Navy information.

Kazak uses a ‘pultrusion’ process to make the components, which Fanucci said is key to the company’s success. “Pultrusion is taking fibers and resins, and the trick is to combine them into useful shapes cost effectively,” Fanucci said.

The process has been used to make parts of window frames and other items. Kazak modified it to produce panels as wide as 10 feet.

The U.S. Department of Defense invests about $25 billion a year in such composites, and the U.S. Navy is a primary benificiary, according to Mike Bergen, a spokesman for the Navy.

Bergen said the Navy is replacing steel components on ships with composites to avoid rusting and reduce maintenance costs, including ship stanchions produced by Kazak. He said Kazak helped the Navy produce those stanchions using pultrusion for particular resins and fibers the Navy had in mind.

“This particular resin wasn’t formulated for the pultrusion process, but they (Kazak) figured out how to make it work,” Bergen said.

Composite construction costs less than half the price of stainless steel and lasts at least two years longer, according to Navy data.

Kazak is also developing the platform for a sailboat that doesn’t require humans or fuel. The company completed Phase 1 of the STTR-funded project last week with Cambridge-based Draper Laboratories for the self-powered unmanned sailboat for the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

“You can tell it where to go and it is self-powered. It generates its own power by moving through the water,” Fanucci said.

The sailboat, if it moves to production, would be used for various types of surveillance in places unsafe for people.

Fanucci was vice president of American Composite Technology before he established Kazak, which has a second operation in Yemassee, S.C.

While composites are used in most industries, companies supplying the Navy with composite parts include Structural Composites of West Melbourne, Fla.; Glenair Inc., of Glendale, Calif.; Portland, Maine-based Maine Marine Manufacturing; and Marine Design & Concepts of Owings, Md.